"Privacy interests are highly vulnerable in a world of CCTV, vast and growing data banks of personal information and spy satalites in the sky. The seriousness of the threat posed to privacy interests in modern society, in conjunction with a proper understanding of privacy's key contribution to human flourishing, justifies mutual duties of respect for privacy. These duties extend, with appropriate modifications in their detailed specification, to a wide range of formal and informal roles and relationships. Professionals such as doctors and lawyers owe privacy-based duties to their patients and clients; employers and employees respectively bear whatever duties of privacy are implied by their particular employment relationship. Officials of all kinds have important privacy-based duties. In the criminal justice context, police officers are not only the most obvious example of state officials with duties to respect privacy, but also demonstrate in their day-to-day activities the manifold ways in which privacy is imperiled by the exercise of official state power. A less familiar but no less important second example is that legislators have duties to enact laws that provide an appropriate measure of protection for privacy interests, and further laws to secure appropriate redress when privacy rights are infringed, as they inevitably will be on occasion."
January 1, 1970