ChoicePoint Chairman and CEO Derek Smith made a distinction between the right to privacy and the right to anonymity … he accepted the former but not the latter. The debate over the right to privacy came up in the 1890s in the context of another new technology - photography … and its use in newspapers.
Recent inventions and business methods call attention to … what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone".
Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops." For years there has been a feeling that the law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons; ... and the evil of invasion of privacy by the newspapers