This comes as a surprise to many people, who tend to assume that privacy is one of the bedrock rights upon which American society is built. Two of these were cameras and high-speed printing presses. For the first time, spontaneous, unposed pictures could be taken, quickly printed in newspapers and books, and distributed widely, all without the subjects' consent. In other words, the two men broadened the legal conception of privacy to include not only the tangible but also the intangible realm. One cannot help hearing echoes of it in, to take just one important example, the landmark privacy decision set forth by the Supreme Court in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut.
Various guarantees create zones of privacy.
Arguing in the tradition of Warren, Brandeis, and Douglas, Westin made a compelling case that the Bill of Rights guaranteed a zone of privacy not only for one's person, one's sayings and acts, and one's relations but also for information about oneself. Ever since the publication of Privacy and Freedom, Westin has been sought out as an expert on information privacy and business. Since 1993 he has been the editor and publisher of the influential bimonthly newsletter Privacy and American Business. One of the results of his work on those surveys is that he has developed a widely cited taxonomy of American consumers, based on their attitudes toward privacy. Westin divides the population into three categories.