J o h n D e i g h t o n
Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 voiced the idea that each of us has a ''right to be let alone.'' If there really was such a right, if people claimed it, and if it were enforced, the direct marketing industry would be rather smaller than it is today. It is some comfort to the industry, therefore, that Mr. Brandeis's phrase, written in a dissent from a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, falls well short of any privacy law passed by any legislature in any state or nation on the globe, despite the regularity with which the desire to be let alone appears on the wish lists of voters.
Indeed some scholars argue that a universal and all-purpose protection of individual privacy is impossible. Westin (1995) contends that no durable definition of privacy is possible because privacy issues are fundamentally matters of values, interests, and power. Certainly the idea of privacy is so hedged about with personal and contextual considerations that legislative interventions are few and unsatisfactory. His recent review of the effectiveness of just one act of restricted and precise applicability, the Privacy Act of 1974 to protect citizens against privacy invasion by the U.S. government, concludes, ''The act addresses the full range of fair information practice and it applies them to all government records about individuals. . . . Yet the act clearly failed to offer any real resistance to broader and unforeseen uses of personal information supported by computers. . . . Compliance with the Privacy Act is an afterthought at most agencies'' (Westin 1995).