PRIVACY RESEARCH
My work on privacy was originally concerned with the problem of reconciling legal protections for privacy with women’s claims to sexual equality. This, in turn, led to the puzzle of why people in a democratic society would need legal protections for privacy if they already had democratic civil and political rights and liberties. My answers to these questions emphasised the importance of people’s political, as well as personal, interests in privacy and the ways in which legal protections for privacy can help to challenge undemocratic conceptions of politics and sexual oppression.
More recently, my research has focused on conflicts between privacy and security and between privacy and freedom of expression, and on the relationship between privacy and property rights. I am now working on two articles about privacy. The first is called Privacy and the Publication of True Facts. It investigates what privacy interests, if any, people might have in true but embarrassing, painful and dangerous facts about themselves and is partly motivated by the case of Max Mosley and the News of the World. The second, which I will be presenting to the Political Science Association’s Inaugural Conference on the Politics of Property, in April 2009, is called, Is Privacy Just Property In Disguise? It addresses Judith Thomson’s claims that privacy rights are just an arbitrary mishmash of rights to privacy, property and bodily integrity.
Currently, I am also finishing revisions to On Privacy, which Routledge will publish as part of its Thinking in Action series. It will provide an accessible introduction to debates about the value of privacy and the merits of legal rights to privacy for a lay and scholarly audience.
Go to Publications on Privacy