| When individuals choose between competing activities they do so based upon the expected utility of each of their alternatives. This utility is composed of intrinsic and reputational components. Social norms determine the reputation attached to participating in an activity. Privacy allows individuals to avoid the effects of social norms. Thus, by shielding them from the reputational costs and benefits imposed by social norms, privacy affects individuals' choices between competing activities.;By manipulating levels of privacy, government (and others) can exert social control. In some cases, social regulation by affecting reputational utility is a serious and/or superior alternative to legal regulation, which affects intrinsic utility. A theory of social control by reputational costs is relevant to a large number of laws, legal doctrines and institutions. In this paper I review in detail a group of legal doctrines, those which control one individual's rights to publicize truthful information about another, and (the regulation of) one industry, that of sexually explicit materials, which includes materials categorized as both obscenity and pornography. The common feature of both is government's ability to alter individuals behavior by controlling the level of their exposure to social norms.;Privacy is relevant not only to the effects social norms have on individuals but also to those that individuals, and society, have on social norms. Thus, where a social norm is only enforced in the public sphere, it may be an attempt to shield individuals from the social norm, but it may also be an attempt to shield the norm from destruction, where public enforcement may lead to the "outing" of a significant part of society. Comparing privacy laws in the United States, France and Israel reveals that there are (different) social norms about privacy levels (in addition to different social norms about activities) and about the acceptable ways by which information about individuals is conveyed and/or published. A serious attempt to understand privacy's role and to utilize it for social control requires familiarity with the make-up of the relevant society, as well as with the content of the social norms prevailing in such society. |
