A typology of privacy

Despite the difficulty of capturing the nature and boundaries of privacy, it is important to conceptualize it. Some scholars develop unitary theories of privacy in the form of a unified conceptual core; others offer classifications of privacy that make meaningful distinc-Tions between different types of privacy. We argue that the latter approach is underdeveloped and in need of improvement. In this Article, we propose a typology of privacy that is more systematic and comprehensive than any existing model. We developed our typology by, first, conducting a systematic analysis of constitutional protections of privacy in nine jurisdic-Tions: The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Nether-lands, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia. This analysis yields a broad overview of the types of privacy that constitutional law seeks to protect. Second, we studied literature from privacy scholars in the same nine jurisdictions in order to identify the main dimensions along which privacy has been, or can be, classified.