Privacy Laws

Abstract

This entry introduces the major tort‐based privacy laws that affect journalism in the United States, with some focus on how other countries' laws have influenced and compared with those laws. In the United States, many suggest that privacy law began in 1890 after the journalism‐condemning publication of “The Right to Privacy,” an article that referred in part to legal concepts from France and England. Nearly a century later, privacy law in the United States became four distinct privacy‐related torts: misappropriation, intrusion, publication of private facts, and false light. While torts such as intentional infliction of emotional distress are also in somewhat common use in the United States, these four torts form the backbone of journalism‐relevant privacy law in ways that are, at times, not dissimilar from other parts of the world.