zlacker

Yes. Implicitly.

Ex Wikipedia: Over 186 constitutions mention the right to privacy

https://www.constituteproject.org/constitutions?key=privacy

Oh, and sniper: because the right to privacy will be defended by a number of individuals with radical violence, as you should know if you ever visited the world, so evidently I should not even need to proceed from «Yes. Implicitly».

So contextually: if it were not anonymous, it would not be used (but by a specific class of entities).

>>mdp202+(OP)
Possibly worth pointing out that a constitutional right to privacy no longer exists in the US after SCOTUS nullified Roe v. Wade. They were willing to throw the baby, the bathwater and the bathtub out for that one.

>>krapp+H
The Constitution of the USA still contains the IV Amendment in the Bill of Rights, I suppose:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized

>>mdp202+(OP)
I don't know if this applies to US law, but privacy and anonymity are often different and unrelated concepts.

>>mdp202+21
This is not a right to privacy or anonymity; privacy is a predicate of the 4th Amendment, not a positive assertion; it governs when the government can conduct searches.

>>tptace+Y1
It states that people have a right about their private records («papers») not being searched - unless necessary. So it states that the normal state is said privacy, and breach is the exception.

>>marcos+u1
In the relevant cases privacy and anonymity converge: to be part of your private sphere, your access to information must be anonymous.

>>mdp202+l4
Anonymity is about your conversation peers not having access to your identity, while privacy is about unrelated parties not having access to your conversation.

In legal matters, those two rarely converge. On technical matters both are usually abstracted as "keeping information secret", but even then they often require widely different techniques to be preserved.

>>marcos+z5
> conversation

But the context here can hardly be instanced in the case of "conversation". Before protecting exchanges (in privacy and anonymity), there is the act of accessing information that would make an intruder an eavesdropping peeping tom.

It is more clear in its actual context: the "private space", which could be breached by so-called "intrusion upon seclusion" cases (peeping, eavesdropping etc.), is protected - see e.g. the case of the "IV amendment" (discussed nearby), protecting against the intrusion in one's «papers» (instance of a broader private space relevant to the explicit context of «searching» as primary practical concern), and base for more specific legislation, possibly after Warren and Brandeis' "The Right to Privacy" - which is relevant because further legislation got needed after new technical-aided phenomena (the gossip press) breaching base principles otherwise formerly threatened by «the idle and... the vicious» (Warren and Brandeis).

So: having rights about a private space, one's act of accessing information must be in anonymous form.

>>mdp202+R3
You’re both correct— tptacek is correct in that the 4th amendment is constrained to government search and seizure and there is no positive assertion regarding privacy written into the constitution. But you’re also correct in principle, as the strongest positive assertion regarding privacy (in general) from the U.S. federal gov’t originates in the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut from 1965, and Justice William O. Douglas’ reference to privacy as a right inferred primarily as ‘penumbras’ extending from the more specific guarantees of the first 5 amendments.

Edited to Add: All bets are off now, as the court has explicitly reversed stance on this as it regards abortion, which leaves a big precedent for expanding future privacy “exceptions”.

>>ldayle+bd
I don't think the future is all that bright for the privacy penumbra theory of US Con Law. I'm not a lawyer or a Con Law scholar but my understanding is that modern courts have recast the outcome of Griswold into one involving procedural and not substantive rights; of liberty and due process, not of positive rights emanating broadly from the text.

>>ldayle+bd
Please note that my original reference to the Constitutions was made to go to the chief social contracts, for brevity: in the case of the USA (which we have picked again to focus on some important cases), condemnation of trespassing, peeping and eavesdropping was part (I understand) of the Common Law from the beginning (inherited from Britain).

They are all cases of instances of breach of a basic principle - license of intrusion is limited, naturally -, which in law needs to be made explicit to sanction specific cases, but remains otherwise evident (in the case of privacy, its breaches are easily farcical).

In Europe, the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), signed by 46 States, specifies in Article 8: «Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence» (again, an example picked for prominence).

Please also note with reference to your «All bets are off now» that discussion will be made about the boundaries of the principle in practice - the Principle remains.