Senior Privacy Program Manager

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published an article called “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. They weren't responding to a court ruling or a piece of legislation. They were responding to the gossip pages.

Boston's newspapers had started printing details of private social events (weddings, dinner parties, the comings and goings of wealthy families) because instantaneous photography and new printing technology had made it cheap and easy to do so. The law had nothing to say about it. There was no remedy. The information was true, it had been observed in semi-public settings, and publishing it was legal.

Warren and Brandeis thought that was wrong. Not just impolite, legally wrong. They argued that individuals had a right that the law hadn't yet named: the right, as they put it, to be left alone. Technology had outrun the rules, and someone needed to write new ones. Nearly every privacy framework that exists today traces its intellectual lineage back to this article.

Technology keeps outrunning the rules. We need to build frameworks that make trust possible. At Mercury, we know that e