Abstract
How the prevailing legal concept of privacy facilitates the erosion of privacy is examined. The law generally measures privacy by reference to society's reasonable expectation of privacy. The expectation-driven conception of privacy in effect establishes a privacy marketplace, analogous in both a literal and metaphorical sense to a marketplace of ideas. In this marketplace, societal expectations of privacy fluctuate in response to changing social practices. For this reason, privacy is susceptible to encroachment at the hands of large institutional actors who can control this marketplace by affecting social practices. Two essential elements of the erosion of privacy - embedded imprecision and internalization - are also identified. Finally, pervasive failures in the literal and metaphorical privacy marketplaces are examined.