Privacy

Abstract

At least since Aristotle's distinction between the public domain of political activity (polis) and the private domain of the household (oikos), privacy stands in dialectical tension with publicness. Since the earliest conceptualizations, privacy has also been closely related to “suspicious” secrecy. Assuming that privacy and publicness are opposite but complementary to each other, privacy could be defined as the protected sphere or condition of having exclusive control over one's actions or (cognitive) access provided that it does not hamper actions and rights of others. The boundary between privacy and publicness is socially permeable and historically variable. There is not one dominant conceptualization that is generally accepted. Developments in communication technology and its social uses made privacy and publicness partly overlapping. The concept of privacy is particularly controversial because of the ambivalent nature of its relationship to (the value of) publicness.