In this report I am going to talk about the rights people have to privacy and about the laws that go with privacy. Privacy is the thought that information that is confidential that is disclosed in a private place will not be available to third parties when the information would cause embarrassment or emotional distress to a person. The right of privacy is limited to people who are in a place that a person would reasonably expect to be private such as home, hotel room and even a telephone booth. People think they should be protected by privacy when the conversation is private and should not be heard by others, and the same with going through a persons person things. In the history of privacy laws legal concepts like ownership of real property and contracts originated many years ago now are in law. The right to privacy has now gotten legal recognition and is an evolving area of law.
Early invasions of privacy could be treated as trespassing, assault, or eavesdropping. A reason that privacy is not seen as a fundamental right is that most modern invasions of privacy are with new technology. Before they invented of certain things a person could be certain that their conversation is in private. Before the invention of computer databases, a person might invade another persons privacy by collecting information from interviews and transactions, but the difficulty of collecting such information makes it hard to harm a large number of people. That is why storing information in on paper makes it hard to use information to harm people because it is disorganized.
Today, because privacy is a emerging right, a discussion of privacy is usually consists of a list of examples where the right has been recognized. Privacy can be talked about in the nature of the right and the source of the right. There are four rights in the USA, unreasonable intrusion such as physical invasion, appropriation of a persons name or likeness s, publication of private facts such as income tax data or sexual relations, and publication that places a person in a false light, and the only one that is widely accepted in the US is the second one. A person might also recover under intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, or trespass.
Unreasonable intrusion only applies to secret invasions of privacy. An open invasion would be public and the victim could then chose not to reveal private information. Other privacy rights are contained in criminal statutes such as: interception of conversation in a house or hotel room is eavesdropping, one has privacy for contents of an envelopes sent by first class US Mail, one has a right of privacy for contents of a telephone conversation, telegraph messages or electronic data by wire, one has a right of privacy for contents or a radio messages, a federal statute denies federal funds to educational institutions that do not maintain confidentiality of student records, records of sales or rentals of video tapes are confidential, content of email, bank records, and library records are all also confidential. Other examples of privacy are in professional ethnics such as physician, priest or attorney relationships. The privacy issue is different when the government tries to limit the choices of people in personal areas, such as the use of abortion, marriage, and choice of how to educate children. The right to be alone is the most valued right by men.
To protect that right every intrusion by the government on the privacy of an individual must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. For privacy of businesses, they have no right to privacy. The privacy law is stated only as an individual persons rights, but businesses have rights analogous to the right of privacy. A trademark law holds that a business can own a product name and prevent others from using the same name at least in the owners territory. A example of privacy violations by businesses is in 1791 when the Constitution was written, the major concern of the drafters was that a powerful government could intrude on the privacy of individual citizens, then the provisions in the Bill of Rights, specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to protect citizens from government. Today people also need protection from large companies but the law has been slow to provide such protection.
Privacy of garbage is another situation. The supreme court ruled that the police may legally search a persons garbage without a warrant that a person puts out for collection. People usually place their trash in a plastic bag and put it on the curb for the trash collection service to take it. The bags are usually dark in color and cannot be seen through. The technology to make clear bags in well known but trash bags are always dark. The color of the bag is the firs hint that purchase that bags do not want see through ones because that would allow the contents to be easily seen.
Trash usually contains many personal items such as empty prescription bottles, which have the persons name and name of the drug. Credit card receipts which have the persons name and data are found in trash, letters that contain information on financial, political, religious, family or romantic topics are often found in trash. Empty bottles of alcoholic beverages can also often be found in which may be embarrassing in a town, empty boxes of condoms, birth control pills and and others can be found, along with telephone invoices and paper indicating membership in a political or religious group. One reason that the supreme court denied privacy to trash is that when a bag is out along the road it can be ripped apart by animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public. In most cases of police searching garbage, the defendant has been selling illegal recreational drugs.
There are also situations over if the trash was abandoned properly, and many state and federal trail consider the issue of abandoned properly. Trash bags on the curb might be considered abandoned property. True abandoned property is available to anyone who finds it, but trash bags are placed out in the intention that the trash collectors will take it, and not someone else. The Fourth Amendment to the US constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures of peoples houses by the government. This has been extended to areas immediately surrounding the house as well. Some courts have considered if the garbage bags are inside or outside that area, with a view of protecting the garbage inside but not protecting the garbage outside.
In many cases of computer crime, a person obtained computer account numbers and passwords by searching garbage outside buildings. A way for people to avoid this is to shred everything in a paper shredder before throwing it away. Journalists are protected by freedom of the press that is mentioned in the first amendment to the constitution. Courts do not always protect the press, if something is published that has no real interest and invades someone’s privacy can be fined for doing so. There are also several tv shows that paramedics or firemen enter a home for a call and a tv crew will follow them, and the people inside have no time or may not be in the condition to give permission to enter and in result there have been many reported cases in which the victim later sued for invasion of privacy.