No person stands alone. Social and psychological threads emanate from each of us and connect to many other people, some in quite distant places. And from these people we connect to others; and from them to others still, and so it goes. Thus, there can be no individual notion of complete privacy. There can only be a tapestry of privacy, one woven with the threads that people have assented to. This tapestry is a joint production. An individual and his or her society must weave it together on a loom of technology and policy. How well the weavers work together determines the beauty and sanctity of the fabric. As Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet era, observed:

Peter Lewis, writing more recently, provides an updated American version:

So privacy is a social idea. The concept refers to the Warren and Brandeis(1984) "I want to be left alone" part of a social tension that exists between each individual's innate desire for autonomy, on one hand, and society-at-large's demands for active, purposeful participation on the part of each of its members on the other. The essential fact is that people are dependent on society for personal survival. The threads of personal information that link us to others have a social purpose. In return for providing the rights and privileges of membership, a society places demands - sometimes almost limitless demands-on its members to do the work necessary to sustain and maintain it. This is the only way the collective and its members can survive. Yet, this places a heavy burden on the individual. Yielding to these social obligations can be psychologically and, occasionally, physically painful. Nevertheless, the individual gets something in return: the considerable privileges of membership. Consequently, in order to avoid being left out in the cold -- stranded, helpless, isolated, or ostracized -- individuals are willing to assent to a large number of the obligations placed on them. It is an overriding requirement for their survival. But, it is not the only one.

In opposition to an individual's need to acquiesce to social obligations are several persistent individual requirements, such as: (1) occasional relief from the pain caused by continual participation, (2) a natural quest for personal identity-"the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly" (Erikson, p.38) --people need the protection of privacy to come to understand who they are, (3) the preservation of personhood, and (4) the need to replenish one's psychological and physical resources so that one can continue to contribute to the society in the future. These basic human requirements are the source of an individual's need for privacy. They also speak to the value of privacy as a social institution. In her presentation at the privacy seminar at Georgetown (3/20/98) Janiori Goldman took this observation a step further and argued from a communication perspective that societies need strong individuals in order to build community. Some degree of privacy is essential for making members strong. All of these considerations undergrid individual and social arguments for a person's right to privacy.

The tension between privacy and participation must be resolved by establishing social and cultural norms and forging a social contract. As the anthropologist Barrington Moore (Moore, 1984) has pointed out, in traditional societies, an individuals - right to privacy and the opportunity to exercise that right - are quite limited. The traditional social instruments used to insure individual privacy are also modest: a small personal space in the igloo, a slight turning away of the eyes at crucial moments. These primitive societies have a tight and simple social nexus-usually based on kinship-and they produce little, if any, economic surplus. Consequently, all members of these societies must participate in doing the society's work most of the time. As a result individual privacy is not a very significant social need in these traditional societies.

As societies prosper, however, the needs of individuals change. Technological and social innovation generates a larger economic surplus and results in a greater degree of specialization in the society's division of labor. One consequence of these developments is that the provisions in the social contract for individual privacy and for social participation must be renegotiated. Too many new possibilities arise. In a traditional society, for example, the vast majority of the privacy relationships are established between an individual and the community as a whole (although some personal confidences may be shared with a shaman or tribal leader).

In modern society, in contrast, there are many spheres of privacy. Privacy relationships with the society as a whole-that is the public-generally comprise only a small part of the total set of relationships. People have relationships with thousands of other parties: governments, vendors, employers, insurance companies, financial institutions, lawyers, doctors, health care institutions, and, as de Tocqueville so aptly put it, myriad's of "associations." Moreover, in a modem society the institutional and technological tools for securing privacy are many and varied. The simple act of glancing in the other direction no longer provides adequate privacy protection.

A major challenge of this information age is to establish the proper balance between individual privacy and social participation - between autonomy and public responsibility. Honoring the right to privacy requires that an appropriate means be found for enforcing each individual's zone of inaccessibility. This has significant implications for the processing of personal information-that is, for the computers and networks handling information that identifies and describes a specific, unique individual. On one hand, for a modern society to do its work personal information must flow. The essential glue of any society resides in its ability to share information about members to each other. On the other hand, societies, at least those which value individual liberty, must also encourage the development of each individual member, qua individual; and, these societies must accord each member a certain degree of dignity. Meeting this second demand requires that some information about an individual not be permitted to flow and not be shared with others. That is, it requires that individual rights to privacy be established and enforced.

The possibilities establish a kind of continuum. Public information, which is available to all, sits on one end. Private information, which is retained exclusively by each individual, sits in the other end. In between there lies an immense lattice of other possibilities. Most of the work of society is performed by institutions, groups or units whose scope is smaller than the society as a whole and larger than a single individual. Each of these decision structures may require personal information about individuals in order to provide these individuals with services or to carry out other legitimate social functions. Individual members of a society may voluntarily and freely divulge personal information to these decision structures in order to receive the goods and services they provide or as required by law. So, for the most part, the question is not whether an individual may have privacy or not. In our modem complex society the essential questions have become: Where do we draw the lines of privacy given the many different decision structures individual members must associate with? And, how do we enforce the lines once they are drawn? A general framework will serve as a backdrop for examining these questions.