Internet, Privacy , and Progressive Halakhah 91 ————————————————————————————————————— eee eee eee A Similar legislation has been adopted in Europe, ’ the United Kingdom, ” Canada, ’ and Israel, " among other jurisdictions.

Even so, the Warren-Brandeis thesis continues to attract its fair share of criticism in the jurisprudential literature. Some of the objections revolve around the most basic issues of definition. As one observer put it,“Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any very clear idea what it is.”*! What, exactly, do we mean by“privacy,” and what sorts of interests does the legal right to privacy protect? Warren and Brandeis focus their article upon injury to personal reputation, but contemporary legal theorists argue that the potential harm from invasion of privacy can extend far beyond that boundary. Others question the very notion of a right to privacy in the context of a liberal society. A general right to be compensated against all forms of intrusion is difficult to square with the rights of free speech and expression, and actions taken to protect one’s“inviolate personality” may well hamper the free flow of information so vital to democratic discourse.” For our purposes, however, the most important criticisms are those that have attacked the Warren­Brandeis thesis as a null set. The argument over this criticism has been characterized as“a philosophical debate between those who regard privacy as but a name for a grab-bag of intellectual goodies and those who think it is a unitary concept.” In the literature, the members of the former group are often termed“reductionists,” in that they hold the concept of the“right to privacy” can be successfully reduced and limited to its component elements. Primary among them was the noted torts scholar William L. Prosser , who contended, based upon an analysis of the privacy cases brought forth since the Warren-Brandeis article, that the privacy tort“is not one tort but a complex of four,” comprising “four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff.”* Since each of these interests is essentially a property interest, Prosser rejected the Warren-Brandeis distinction between privacy and property. In his view, the privacy tort is the invasion of property interests and nothing more. It follows that, to Prosser, the“right to privacy” is no greater than the sum total of the