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Privacy Rights in the Digital Age

Public morality

by Michael J. Puniskis

The observance and subscription to the moral principles, ethical standards, and fundamental values in which a society enforces or upholds, either by statutory law, police work or social pressure, norms or expectations, and applied to everyday public life, from the regulation of behaviour of individual citizens in public spaces to the control of material appearing in the media. In other words, these are behaviors and actions are regarded as contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, good morals, and integrity. These types of crimes have been otherwise referred to as crimes against public decency, public moral crimes, and crimes of moral turpitude; they may also include some forms of deviancy.

In some cases, these offenses are also commonly known as vice crime—practices or behaviors deemed immoral, sinful or degrading—as they work to contaminate the social well-being of society, and bring to question aspects concerning the perpetrator's character or morality. Attitudes towards public morality may change over time, and they may also vary by country and culture, and thus legal jurisdiction. For example, there may be differences in otherwise mundane behaviors, such as the consumption of food or alcohol on public transportation, while other public moral crimes, such as murder, will continue to remain a capital offense.

In today's society, there are many examples of issues and offenses often regulated by public morality, with some receiving more attention than others. For example, while religious codes have historically forbidden sex offenses such as seduction, adultery, polygamy, fornication, contraception, and homosexuality, tolerance and acceptability of these offenses have come to vary over time and across cultures.The same could be said of prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute, which fluctuate in legal status and acceptability by country and culture. Likewise, society has become more tolerant of some types of legally controlled and less visibly advertised forms of prostitution, such as escorts and sex tourism, and less tolerant of more visible and low-level types, such as the more commonly known street prostitution. A similar case is the consumption and production of pornography, and in particular, the exposure to minors. Cases of child or underage pornography have been regarded as much more serious public morality crimes. Other examples of public moral offenses include drug use, gambling, public intoxication and vulgarity, abortion, suicide and euthanasia, animal cruelty, and corruption, to name a few.

In the United States, the privacy rights and personal autonomy of American citizens are safeguarded by the Constitution, and since being established, the Supreme Court has interpreted these rights through several landmark decisions in relation to many areas surrounding public morality issues, such as marriage, procreation, homosexual activity, and pornography, to name a few.For example, with regard to marital privacy, after the State of Connecticut in 1965 convicted two individuals as accessories for providing information and prescription of contraception to a married couple in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, the Supreme Court later overturned the ruling as the state law was deemed to be unconstitutional as violating the privacy rights of those in a marital relationship.

Later in 1972, in the similar case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, the Supreme Court expanded upon privacy rights to include all procreative sexual intercourse, after reversing a ruling based on a Massachusetts law that banned the selling of contraceptives to unwed couples.With regard to pornography, in deciding Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), the Supreme Court invalidated all state laws prohibiting the private possession of obscene materials for adults.In 1986, a Georgia statute making same-sex sodomy illegal was upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (2003). Bowers was overturned with the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), which upheld adults' rights to engage in private homosexual activity.

Privacy rights are growing increasingly complex in today's digital era, with the risk of violation more common than before. Advances in computer technology have drastically improved the capability and range of real-time communication and sharing of information, which have nonetheless afforded many benefits to global society. Consequently, new privacy vulnerabilities have been created, from identity theft and financial fraud by hackers, to abuses in electronic surveillance and interception by state actors. Over time, these new technologies have consequently established extensive repositories of metadata—telephone calls, e-mails, Internet browsing activity, etc.—and thus potentially evidence of public moral crimes and other information of significance to governments.As such, new types of surveillance programs have been created, which raise the issue of how privacy rights can continue to be protected while being invaded in the digital era. For example, in 2013 former CIA employee Edward Snowden publicly revealed information on several global surveillance and data harvesting programs on American citizens since the early 2000s by the U.S. National Security Agency.

With advances in social media, more individuals begin to shift their personal and private lives into a new technological sphere of public life whereby public morality offenses can easily become known. Consequently, in today's digital world lawmakers and governments have the challenge of ensuring the protection of privacy while continuing to develop new ways to maintain a safe society.

Further Reading

1 

Condit, Celeste Michelle. “Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construction of Public Morality.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 1 (1987): 79–97.

2 

George, Robert P. “The Concept of Public Morality.” American Journal of Jurisprudence 45, no. 1 (2000): 17–31.

3 

Hampshire, Stuart, ed. Public and Private Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

4 

Richards, David A. J. “Liberalism, Public Morality, and Constitutional Law: Prolegomenon to a Theory of the Constitutional Right to Privacy.” Law and Contemporary Problems 51, no. 1 (1988): 123–150.

5 

Willbern, York. “Types and Levels of Public Morality.” Public Administration Review 44, no. 2 (1984): 102–108.

6 

Wolfe, C. (2000). “Public Morality and the Modern Supreme Court.” American Journal of Modern Jurisprudence 45 (1): 66–92.

See also: Constitutional law; Electronic surveillance; Griswold v. Connecticut; Lawrence v. Texas; Metadata; National Security Agency (NSA); “The Right of Privacy”; Snowden, Edward Joseph; Stanley v. Georgia; Supreme Court of the United States

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Puniskis, Michael J. "Public Morality." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA_0175.
APA 7th
Puniskis, M. J. (2016). Public morality. In C. Anglim & JD (Ed.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Puniskis, Michael J. "Public Morality." Edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.