Principles of Internet Privacy

Paul Schwartz's Internet Privacy and the State makes an important and original contribution to the privacy debate that is currently raging by beginning the process of framing a new and more useful understanding of what "privacy" is and why and how it should be protected.' The definition developed by Brandeis, Warren,2 and Prosser,3 and effectively codified by Alan Westin in 1967---"the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others"---worked well in a world in which most privacy concerns involved physical intrusions (usually by the government) or public disclosures (usually by the media), which, by their very nature, were comparatively rare and usually discovered...

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