Both are intertwined, but they may be losing their economic value in contemporary society. It is true that “lovers persons must be intimate […] with each other” and that “intimacy is the sharing of information […] which one does not share with all” (Fried 484). However, looking to spousal privilege, affording it to criminals does not make much economic sense. As opposed to attorney-client privilege, a “reply is unavailable in the case of the spousal immunity.” If anything, refusing to testify or reveal communication “raises the costs of the crime” and because “the importance attached to stable marriages has declined,” any economic advantage of this privilege has come into doubt (Posner 21). Notwithstanding criminals, in other situations, privacy is essential to love. When lovers give up information to each other, they do it “in favor of new, shared interests which the lovers create and value as the expression of their relationship.” It is this private exchange that creates moral capital, which is used in love (Fried 480). As agreed to before, if the information was shared with the world aimlessly, there would be no value or intimacy associated with love (484). Again the context is necessary to define privacy; the right is …show more content…
The facets of this relationship extend to the free-market in the form of innovation. If information is produced and publicly spread through a friendship, it would prevent “the original producer of the information, the innovator, from recouping his investment in its production” (Posner 9). Since information is purposefully left out, it allows the friend to “maintain [different] degrees of intimacy” with others (Fried 485). Information given out that would harm one’s ability to innovate would not be economically beneficial. In such case, privacy would be kept. However, if the relinquishment of the information benefits the friendship which has significance to the “total economy of a person’s life and interests,” then it will be given away and there will be no privacy in the matter (481). This discussion extends to SNSs too. Younger Facebook users expressed that they did not want their parents as friends on the site because they did not want them “to know everything” (Brandtzaeg et al. 1021). Moreover, users found it difficult to group their friends and instead they could only be categorized as weak or strong (1022). Keep in mind that on SNSs all information is public, especially since users have a weak aptitude for privacy settings