The privacy laws of the United States deal with several different legal concepts. One is the invasion of privacy, a tort based in common law allowing an aggrieved party to bring a lawsuit against an individual who unlawfully intrudes into their private affairs, discloses their private information, publicizes them in a false light, or appropriates their name for personal gain.
The essence of the law derives from a right to privacy, defined broadly as "the right to be let alone." It usually excludes personal matters or activities which may reasonably be of public interest, like those of celebrities or participants in newsworthy events. Invasion of the right to privacy can be the basis for a lawsuit for damages against the person or entity violating the right. These include the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unwarranted search or seizure, the First Amendment right to free assembly, and the Fourteenth Amendment due process right, recognized by the Supreme Court as protecting a general right to privacy within family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, and child rearing.
Attempts to improve consumer privacy protections in the US in the wake of the 2017 Equifax data breach, which affected 145.5 million US consumers, failed to pass in Congress.
Right to privacy.
Early years.
The early years in the development of privacy rights began with English common law, protecting "only the physical interference of life and property". The Castle doctrine analogizes a person's home to their castle – a site that is private and should not be accessible without permission of the owner. The development of tort remedies by the common law is "one of the most significant chapters in the history of privacy law". Those rights expanded to include a "recognition of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect." Eventually, the scope of those rights broadened even further to include a basic "right to be let alone," and the former definition of "property" would then comprise "every form of possession – intangible, as well as tangible." By the late 19th century, interest in privacy grew as a result of the growth of print media, especially newspapers.
Between 1850 and 1890, U.S. newspaper circulation grew by 1,000 percent – from 100 papers with 800,000 readers to 900 papers with more than 8 million readers. In addition, newspaper journalism became more sensationalized, and was termed yellow journalism. The growth of industrialism led to rapid advances in technology, including the handheld camera, as opposed to earlier studio cameras, which were much heavier and larger. In 1884, Eastman Kodak company introduced their Kodak Brownie, and it became a mass market camera by 1901, cheap enough for the general public. This allowed people and journalists to take candid snapshots in public places for the first time.
Privacy was dealt with at the state level. For example, Pavesich v New England Life Insurance Company (in 1905) was one of the first specific endorsements of the right to privacy as derived from natural law in US law. Judith Wagner DeCew stated, "Pavesich was the first case to recognize privacy as a right in tort law by invoking natural law, common law, and constitutional values."
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, partners in a new law firm, feared that this new small camera technology would be used by the "sensationalistic press." Seeing this becoming a likely challenge to individual privacy rights, they wrote the "pathbreaking" Harvard Law Review article in 1890, "The Right to Privacy". According to legal scholar Roscoe Pound, the article did "nothing less than add a chapter to our law", and in 1966 legal textbook author, Harry Kalven, hailed it as the "most influential law review article of all". In the Supreme Court case of Kyllo v United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the article was cited by a majority of justices, both those concurring and those dissenting.
