E-Book Overview
Privacy and Freedom was originally published in 1967. Through his work--notably his book “Privacy and Freedom,”--Alan Westin was considered to have created the modern field of privacy law. This is a foundational work in the evolution of modern privacy law, and should appeal to academics, legal scholars and lay people alike. Can be compared to other best-selling foundational texts published by Ig, such as Bernay's Propaganda and Packard's Hidden Persuaders. Blurb to come from Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center and author of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America and The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age. Introduction from Daniel Solove, Professor of Law at George Washington University and author of NOTHING TO HIDE: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security Book will feature a brand new introduction written by Westin just before his death in 2013. The Washington Post in 2013 called it "The best book on privacy written in the late 20th century. Westin identifies four states of privacy: solitude, intimacy, reserve and anonymity....the book inspired many of the privacy reforms of the 1970s and 1980s--such as those championed by the Church Commission and enacted in the Foreign Intelligence Act ..." He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis."'Jeffrey Rosen In defining privacy as "the claim of individuals'to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated," Alan Westin's 1967 classic Privacy and Freedom laid the philosophical groundwork for the current debates about technology and personal freedom, and is considered a foundational text in the field of privacy law. By arguing that citizens retained control over how their personal data was used, Westin redefined privacy as an individual freedom, taking Justice Louis Brandeis' 19th century definition of privacy as a legal right and expanding it for use in modern times. Westin's ideas transformed the meaning of privacy, leading to a spate of privacy laws in the 1970s, as well as prefiguring the arguments over privacy that have come to dominate the internet era. This all new edition of Privacy and Freedom features an introduction by Daniel J. Solove, John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School.
E-Book Content
Copyright © 1967 by The Association of the Bar of the City of New York. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to: Ig Publishing Box 2547 New York, NY 10163 www.igpub.com ISBN: 978-1-63246-073-8 (ebook) To my mother, Etta Westin, and the memory of my father, Irving Westin The Legacy of Privacy and Freedom Daniel J. Solove WHEN IT WAS first published in 1967, Alan Westin’s Privacy and Freedom was one of the most important works in a renaissance in scholarship about information privacy. Prior to that time, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s 1890 article, “The Right to Privacy,” and William Prosser’s 1960 article, “Privacy,” were the most notable works, and only a few other scholars had addressed the topic. Westin’s book was at the forefront of a wave of scholarship about information privacy that began in the late 1960s and grew as computers came into wider use. This wave began accelerating in the mid-1990s with the rise of the Internet, and it has continued with its exponential growth to this day. Privacy and Freedom was truly prescient. Far ahead of its time, the book became a foundational work in the field. Westin focuses on how the amassing of personal data into gigantic databases threatens individuals. His book set the stage for his later work in the early 1970s in helping to craft the Fair Information Practice Principles (F