“A man’s house is his castle”
“Privacy is a special kind of independence, which can be understood as an attempt to secure autonomy in at least a few personal and spiritual concerns, if necessary in defiance of all the pressures of modern society. It is an attempt, that is to say, to do more than maintain a posture of self respecting independence toward other men; it seeks to erect an unbreakable wall of dignity and reserve against the entire world.”
Clinton Rositter,
“The Free Man in the Free Society”
The Essentials of Freedom
The desire for privacy is distinctively human. It is a function of man’s unique ethical, intellectual and artistic needs. Over the years legal scholars have attempted to define privacy but it is only in the last century this word has been used as a legal concept to describe the state’s duty to let its people alone in certain spheres of their lives2. Later in the course of its academic and juristic evolution, the concept in brief and in clear terms has been described as the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about themselves is communicated to others.
Recent legislative and judicial recognition of the significance of privacy and the right to privacy are understandable from several perspectives: historical changes and advanced technology, recent acknowledgement of psychological and sociological needs for individuals to maintain minimal conditions of
privacy for self-development; and the heritage of limited governance and ideological commitment to individualism in recent political history. Indeed, the growing controversy over the privacy safeguard appear at the broadest political perspective as nothing less than a concern for freedom from government intrusion into citizens’ lives.3 Current legal preoccupation with privacy protection, is both unique and paradoxical:
unique in terms of judicial decisions and legislations: relating to privacy, and paradoxical because even though world constitutions do not guarantee a right of privacy, judicial decisions entitled right of privacy as a fundamental right emerging from the totality of the constitutional schemes of modern liberal democracies.
