ABSTRACT
A person’s sense of privacy cannot be taken for granted as an innate or intrinsic part of human nature. We know, for example, that the boundaries of acceptable personal space vary from one society to another (Hall, 1990). And within one culture, the relationship between public and private space may change. In Western civilization, the right to a private life did not always exist or did not exist in the form we recognize today. Our founding fathers, for example, defined the right to privacy in the Fourth Amendment to the US constitution (1995), which provides security against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the 21st century, the widespread use of social media on a global scale has upended previous assumptions about what should remain private. The advent of ‘virtual reality’ has led either to a shrinking of privacy or its expansion, depending on one’s point of view.
