Although privacy and its protection are hotly debated in the beginning of the twenty-first century, what is being debated is poorly defined. According to definitions of "privacy" and "private" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, "privacy" denotes an element of being withheld from public view, of "belonging to oneself," of "freedom from unauthorized oversight or observation of others." Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, in a seminal 1890 article, called privacy "the right to be let alone." But whether privacy is a civil right, a property right, a market commodity, or all of these at one time or another is unsettled.

Concerns about privacy at the time of the Brandeis and Warren article focused on intrusive photographers and gossip columns, not the records of business or government. In the late twentieth century, the issue of informational privacy came to the forefront with the rapid development of...