Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis

The "Overview of the Privacy Act of 1974," prepared by the Department of Justice's Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties (OPCL), is a discussion of the Privacy Act's disclosure prohibition, its access and amendment provisions, and its agency recordkeeping requirements. Tracking the provisions of the Act itself, the Overview provides reference to, and legal analysis of, court decisions interpreting the Act's provisions.

Today, more than ever, organizations have to cope with increased concerns regarding privacy issues. These concerns are not limited to consumer fears about how information collected by Web sites will be used or misused. They also involve broader issues, including data collected for direct response marketing, privacy of financial and health records,

Contents: computer monitoring and information policy: lessons learned from the Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act; ethical online marketing: using targeted direct E-mail in a politically correct way; intelligent agents in cyberspace; intellectual property rights: employer responsibilities; restricting Web access in the workplace: pornography and games at work, and more. Extensive appendices including: policy manuals on E-mail, internet use, software policy, employee monitoring, computer ethics, privacy, foreign laws affecting DP and transborder data flows, copyright, and much more.

Increasingly, computers are a part of even the most ordinary and simple aspects of human existence. Computers have changed forever how we work, learn, shop and seek information. They have also, since the 1960s, been programmed to monitor and analyze in various ways the interaction between humans and themselves. The rapid development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s has given new life, direction and urgency to this enterprise. This work describes the myriad ways, benign or malign, in which computers are used to monitor people's use of computers. Four distinct contexts for monitoring are examined: formal learning environments (e.g., educational software); information seeking environments (e.g., online library catalogs); the workplace; and the Internet (e.g., online shopping). Computerized monitoring often is called an invasion of privacy, and the conceptual and ethical dimensions of confidentiality and privacy in virtual environments are explored at length. In addition to providing information about the various computerized monitoring tools and techniques, this work focuses on the broader social, conceptual, ethical and legal implications.