Digitizing Privacy

Abstract

Digitization has not changed the ways in which we can invade another’s privacy: intrusion, disclosure, false light, and appropriation still cover the range of possible invasions. But because of digitization, invasions of privacy have become more penetrating, pervasive, and prevalent. What we have lost is nothing different in kind than what was lost before when we only had to worry about eavesdropping and peeping Toms, but by explaining how digitization has affected the privacy torts, we gain a better understanding of a moral harm that underlies all invasions of privacy—being treated as an object to be viewed, used, and manipulated.