"Gavison's approach to privacy is criticised as “arbitrary” by David Feldman, “Secrecy, Dignity or Autonomy? Views of Privacy as a Civil Liberty” (1994) 47 Current Legal Problems 41, esp. at 52 and n 49. I do not agree that Gavison's normative argument for a particular conception of privacy interests is arbitrary, except in the trivial sense that a different argument might have been made. The real issue, I suggest, is whether Gavison – and this partial adoption of her argument – is right or wrong. Feldman prefers to give privacy rights a more communitarian or collectivist twist: also see his “Privacy-related Rights and their Social Value” in Peter Birks (ed.), “Privacy and Loyalty” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). However, he does not give any example of privacy interests that cannot be acomodated within Gavison's scheme, while his own preferred approach, according to which “[p]rivacy is largely a matter of being able to choose where, when, and with whom to cooperate or to withold co-operation” (“Secrecy, Dignity or Autonomy?” supra, at 51), suffers from the standard objection to “control” or “choice” accounts of privacy: i.e. that privacy interests may be set back by one's own careless or even deliberately self-injuring autonomous conduct, even while one remains fully “in control.” if privacy interests are underpinned by an objective conception of welfare, no entirely subjectivity criterion – such as choice or control – will ever successfully capture their essence, though choice might be important in an argument about privacy “rights”. And see n 41 “infra”."
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Ruth Gavison, “Privacy and the Limits of Law” (1980) 89 “Yale Law Journal” 421 at 423; footnote 34, p.67
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