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Overview
Over 130 years ago, two US lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis – the latter of whom would eventually become a Supreme Court Justice – wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review expressing their concern that technological advances like ‘instantaneous photographs’ and the ‘newspaper enterprise’ were threatening to ‘make good the prediction that “what is whispered in the close shall be proclaimed from the house-tops”’.2 To address this trend, Warren and Brandeis argued that courts should recognise a common law tort based on violations of an individual’s ‘right to privacy’.3 US courts eventually accepted the invitation, and it is easy to consider Warren and Brandeis’ article as the starting point of modern privacy discourse.
It is also easy to consider the article as the starting point of the United States’ long history of privacy leadership. From the US Supreme Court recognising that the US Constitution grants a right to privacy against certain forms of government intrusion to the US Congress enacting the Privacy Act to address potential risks created by government databases to US states adopting laws imposing data breach notification and…
