Content area
Full Text
Introduction
We begin with a metaphor. A co-worker (we shall refer to as “Joe”) comes to your home to collaborate on a work-related project. After a few hours of work, Joe asks to use your bathroom. While there, he looks inside the medicine cabinet, drawers and closets. He then leisurely enters a room with an open door. He examines some photo albums on a bookshelf (containing a few silly pictures taken from a recent vacation). He notes a box marked “Health” that contains invoices and diagnoses from recent medical visits. On a table he sees a folder labeled “Banking”, learns the name of your financial institutions and inspects various transactions. After Joe returns, you remain unaware of his actions and whether he will keep what he has learned to himself or share it all with others.
Has Joe invaded your privacy? While you may feel a sense of violation, lacking any evidence that Joe has targeted you for his snooping, in the eyes of the law, Joe is no criminal. He has neither taken nor damaged any of your possessions. Attempts to bring a civil action against Joe would unlikely yield significant results. After all, you allowed Joe to come to your home to assist you with a work project. You declined to accompany him after granting permission to use the bathroom. Joe encountered an open room with unsecured personal material with no indication it was confidential or off limits for anyone’s inspection. At no time did you and Joe agree about what he could or could not inspect when he entered your home. If Joe is guilty of any transgression, perhaps a misplaced trust has made you at least partially complicit.
Even though Joe’s legal accountability may be remote, it remains difficult to muster any serious defense of his actions. Individually, his inquiries may be trivial (e.g. half of people will admit to looking in a host’s medicine cabinet); collectively, they clearly exceed whatever privileges your permissions afforded him. He may not have disturbed any of your possessions, but he has transgressed upon your personal information. Joe has clearly misread or ignored commonly recognized boundaries of what is and is not available for his inspection.
Now let us add a small twist to the...