Privacy

Dozens of silent watchers, working for corporations that want to learn about you so they can sell you things, track you when you go online. Why does America tolerate all that spying? "Consumers are concerned about their privacy and about being tracked online. But the commission recognizes that a lot of content is advertising-supported, and advertising is tracking-supported," says Peder Magee, a senior staff attorney at the Federal Trade Commission who specializes in "behavioral advertising" policy.

An 11-year-old girl, homesick for reform school and tired and hungry, stabbed her neighbor to death in order to get back into reform school. It's been all over the radio and TV, but the newspapers have been respecting her privacy, despite being charged as an adult for first-degree murder by Philadelphia's get-tough prosecutor, District Attorney Lynne Abraham. This brings to mind a number of other incidents from the traditional story of a man breaking a police station window to get a warm place to sleep, to suicidal people on death row because they want the state to kill them.

Judge Robert Bork has stunned friend and foe alike by asking for full Senate consideration of his appointment to the Supreme Court. He seeks a "deliberative process" in which "facts (are) respected and the deliberations conducted in a manner that will be fair to me and to the . . . more important cause of justice. " Otherwise, he fears, the unprecedented campaign against him will set a precedent for Supreme Court appointment by poll, propaganda and plebiscite. What Bork seeks is no less than his due. But the chances for such a process hinge on an end to the widespread confusion between politics and jurisprudence.

A mystery that foils inquiry is: By what principle does Justice Harry A. Blackmun limit the sweep of the constitutional "privacy right" that is his intense preoccupation? And are his colleagues, among whom he found himself in a minority in a recent case, any less arbitrary regarding privacy? The Supreme Court has affirmed (5-4) the constitutionality of a Georgia statute that criminalizes consensual sodomy, as the statute applies to homosexual sodomy. Justice Byron R. White, joined by Warren E. Burger, Lewis F. Powell Jr., William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor, said none of the cases in which the court invented and elaborated a "privacy right" allows the use of that right as a constitutional scythe to mow down anti-sodomy laws.

LONDON - A topless model has juicy details of a six-month affair with a married soccer star. A prostitute wants to dish the dirt about a sex romp with a British actor. But British courts have gagged the women and journalists from reporting the lurid details or the men's identities. The cases are the latest in a series of British court orders issued to protect the privacy of public figures, usually men involved in extramarital affairs. Press freedom and legal advocates say the public figures - and the mostly male judges issuing the gag orders - are abusing and misinterpreting European human rights law. They ask what would happen if everyone were allowed to stop everyone else from talking about them.

Four of five Americans say they are concerned about a growing threat to their personal privacy - more than twice the number who said they were worried about the issue 20 years ago, according to a survey released yesterday. Alan Westin, professor at Columbia University and academic adviser to the study, which was commissioned by Equifax Inc., one of three major U.S. credit- reporting agencies, attributed the growing concern to ever-increasing computer and technological advancement, coupled with "continuing lack of trust in public institutions.

In common moments of resentment at the media's invasion of privacy, Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Arthur Ashe might find a common solace in the following denunciation: "The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste, the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of every daily paper.

WASHINGTON — More than a third of Americans worry their privacy will suffer if drones like those used to spy on U.S. enemies overseas become the latest police tool for tracking suspected criminals at home, according to an Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll.   Congress has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to come up with safety regulations that will clear the way for routine domestic use of unmanned aircraft within the next three years. The government is under pressure from a wide range of interests to open U.S. skies to drones.

One of every four American homes has cordless telephones, but the owners may be unaware that their conversations can be overheard by their neighbors. Yesterday, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that the constitutional right of privacy does not protect conversations on cordless phones. The ruling is legally binding in only seven states - Iowa, Arkansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota - but it is certain to be cited elsewhere. The Supreme Court gave no reason for its decision.

The furor surrounding the Starr report masks a real crisis, and its consequences may prove more lasting than those that could follow from the possible impeachment of President Clinton. I refer to the erosion of a fundamental element of our freedom - our privacy - implicit in the methods used by Kenneth Starr and, as we have come to learn, by so many of the nation's prosecutors. Our privacy is not simply a privilege derived from our freedom. It is an integral element of our liberty, "the most comprehensive of rights," as Justice Louis D. Brandeis recognized, "and the right most valued by civilized man. " This idea of freedom evolved first in the ancient world and then in the United States in antithesis to the experience of slavery.