The Right to Privacy

1243 Words3 Pages

In this report I am going to talk about the rights people have to privacy and about the laws that go with privacy. Privacy is the thought that information that is confidential that is disclosed in a private place will not be available to third parties when the information would cause embarrassment or emotional distress to a person. The right of privacy is limited to people who are in a place that a person would reasonably expect to be private such as home, hotel room and even a telephone booth. People think they should be protected by privacy when the conversation is private and should not be heard by others, and the same with going through a persons person things. In the history of privacy laws legal concepts like ownership of real property and contracts originated many years ago now are in law. The right to privacy has now gotten legal recognition and is an evolving area of law. Early invasions of privacy could be treated as trespassing, assault, or eavesdropping. A reason that privacy is not seen as a fundamental right is that most modern invasions of privacy are with new technology. Before they invented of certain things a person could be certain that their conversation is in private. Before the invention of computer databases, a person might invade another persons privacy by collecting information from interviews and transactions, but the difficulty of collecting such information makes it hard to harm a large number of people. That is why storing information in on paper makes it hard to use information to harm people because it is disorganized. Today, because privacy is a emerging right, a discussion of privacy is usually consists of a list of examples where the right has been recognized. Privacy can be talked about in the nature of the right and the source of the right. There are four rights in the USA, unreasonable intrusion such as physical invasion, appropriation of a persons name or likenesss, publication of private facts such as income tax data or sexual relations, and publication that places a person in a false light, and the only one that is widely accepted in the US is the second one. A person might also recover under intentional infliction of emotional distress, assa... ... middle of paper ... ... extended to areas immediately surrounding the house as well. Some courts have considered if the garbage bags are inside or outside that area, with a view of protecting the garbage inside but not protecting the garbage outside. In many cases of computer crime, a person obtained computer account numbers and passwords by searching garbage outside buildings. A way for people to avoid this is to shred everything in a paper shredder before throwing it away. Journalists are protected by freedom of the press that is mentioned in the first amendment to the constitution. Courts do not always protect the press, if something is published that has no real interest and invades someone’s privacy can be fined for doing so. There are also several tv shows that paramedics or firemen enter a home for a call and a tv crew will follow them, and the people inside have no time or may not be in the condition to give permission to enter and in result there have been many reported cases in which the victim later sued for invasion of privacy.

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