There are, to be sure, some weighty reasons for pessimism. For one thing, despite all the praise rendered unto“privacy” in the public discourse, it is far from clear that society values that concept to an extent that would motivate the adoption of real protections and reforms. Philosophers and legal theorists, as we shall see, continue to debate the very existence of a“right to privacy” that would demand safeguarding. Even if we concede the existence of such a right, it is arguable that we ourselves have largely waived any“reasonable expectation of privacy”'' by so fully opening ourselves to the digital world. When we conduct so much of our legal, commercial, and social activity online, the argument goes, we implicitly accept upon ourselves the risk that our personal data will be exposed to the gaze of others, particularly if the technology we so eagerly adopt renders that exposure wellnigh inevitable.” If citizens have only themselves to blame for their loss of privacy, in other words, then perhaps their privacy was no so dear to them in the first place.
In this article, I want to explore the web(pun intended) of issues connected with“Internet privacy” from the standpoint of Jewish law and particularly from that of what the participants in this volume would call“progressive halakhah.”" In general, I want to inquire as to the range of responses that we are called upon to make: what sort of teaching should liberal Judaism offer to its communicants in the name of Torah , that is to say from the textual tradition through which“Torah ” has always been expressed? To do so, I will need to confront the very real possibility that the Jewish tradition has nothing of any substance to say. While it should be obvious that the ancient and medieval texts do not mention the Internet, it is of even greater consequence that the concepts of “rights” and“privacy” are also absent from the sources. Jewish legal discourse does not speak the language of“rights,” by which we mean the expectations and protections that the individual can legitimately demand from the society’s legal machinery, but rather that of“duties” and“obligations.”'* Nor does Jewish law mention “privacy” as an independent concept; nowhere in the classical halakhic sources do we read of a duty incumbent upon an