Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations

We all know that Google stores huge amounts of information about everyone who uses its search tools, that Amazon can recommend new books to us based on our past purchases, and that the U.S. government engaged in many data-mining activities during the Bush administration to acquire information about us, including involving telecommunications companies in monitoring our phone calls (currently the subject of a bill in Congress). Control over access to our bodies and to special places, like our homes, has traditionally been the focus of concerns about privacy, but access to information about us is raising new challenges for those anxious to protect our privacy. In Privacy Rights, Adam Moore adds informational privacy to physical and spatial privacy as fundamental to developing a general theory of privacy that is well grounded morally and legally.

About the Author :
Adam D. Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington.

Review :
“Privacy Rights is a lucid and compelling examination of the right to privacy. Adam Moore provides a theoretically rich and trenchant account of how to reconcile privacy with competing interests such as free speech, workplace productivity, and security.” —Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University Law School, author of Understanding Privacy “Adam Moore’s Privacy Rights offers both a sustained philosophical analysis of the concept of privacy and a careful account of how this concept relates to such pressing practical issues as free speech, intellectual property, and workplace drug testing. This book is a first-rate piece of work and is destined to become a landmark volume in the philosophical discussion of privacy.” —James S. Taylor, The College of New Jersey “Privacy Rights is a significant contribution to the literature because it links the theory of privacy defended with other established views in the literature, but goes beyond that and adds new arguments and justifications. In the book, Adam Moore provides a novel endorsement of the value of privacy and privacy rights and a focus on contemporary issues surrounding informational privacy and the conflict between privacy and security, especially in the light of 9/11.” —Judith Wagner DeCew, Clark University “Advocates of privacy should welcome Adam Moore’s engaging defense of privacy rights, and in particular his iconoclastic challenge to the prevailing view that privacy is fine so long as it does not impinge on free speech. . . . [He provides] tools, in the form of principles, arguments, and examples, to help us rigorously put our intuitions about privacy to the test.” —Mark Tunick Social Theory and Practice “In his Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, Adam Moore has taken on the ambitious challenge of offering readers nothing less than ‘a philosophical defense for privacy rights.’ . . . Moore offers an analysis that should be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of academic disciplines as well as to participants in the public policy arena. . . . All readers—and potential readers—of Privacy Rights should applaud the contribution that the author has made to the hybrid literature on privacy, and his imaginative philosophical justifications for particular public policy positions.” —John W. Johnson Review of Politics