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The cause was cancer, his family said.

A lawyer and political scientist, Mr. Westin was at his death emeritus professor of public law at Columbia, where he had taught for nearly 40 years.

Through his work — notably his book "Privacy and Freedom," published in 1967 and still a canonical text — Mr. Westin was considered to have created, almost single-handedly, the modern field of privacy law. He testified frequently on the subject before Congress, spoke about it on television and radio and wrote about it for newspapers and magazines.

"He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis," Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "He transformed the privacy debate by defining privacy as the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others."

Since the first hominid grunted gossip about the hominid next door, every new communications medium has entailed new impingements on privacy. In a seminal 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Brandeis, the future Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, were the first to articulate privacy as a legal right, defining it as "the right to be let alone."

Brandeis and Warren were concerned primarily with covert photography; later scholarship, including work by Mr. Westin in the 1950s, centered on things like illegal wiretapping.

But by the 1960s and '70s, as the widespread computerization of legal, financial, medical and other personal records loomed, technology had outrun the law.

Reproductive rights cases of the period — including the landmark Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — held that the Constitution protected an individual's right to privacy in matters of the human body, including contraceptive use and abortion rights. But the law was largely silent on the question of how personal data might be used by government or the private sector.

During these years, long before the personal computer and longer still before the Internet, Mr. Westin set out to codify just this kind of privacy for the modern age.

"He knew social history, and he could appreciate the directions that the technology was pushing the social contract," Lance J. Hoffman, the director of George Washington's Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute, said in an interview.

Individuals, Mr. Westin argued in "Privacy and Freedom," have the right to determine how much of their personal information is disclosed and to whom, how it should be maintained and how disseminated.

"This concept became the cornerstone of our modern right to privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. "Part of 'Privacy and Freedom' is the argument that privacy enables freedom."

"Privacy and Freedom" received two prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award and the Hillman Prize.

The book, along with other work by Mr. Westin, is widely considered the foundation of a spate of modern privacy laws, among them the Privacy Act of 1974, the first law to delimit the gathering and use of personal information by the federal government.

Mr. Westin was no absolutist. In his early work on wiretapping, for instance, he condoned its use in certain instances, including cases where national security was at stake.

His argument prefigured the current national debate about privacy engendered by post-9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act, which Mr. Westin, in a 2003 interview, called "a justified piece of legislation."

"He insisted on a balance between the competing demands of privacy, disclosure and surveillance," Mr. Rosen said. "Much of his work in the 1960s and '70s appears so prescient after 9/11 and in the age of Internet."

When it came to the use of consumers' personal data by corporations, Mr. Westin also steered a middle course. Consumers were entitled to withhold such data, he argued, but were equally entitled, if they wished, to have it used to alert them to products and services targeted to their interests. (This stance caused Mr. Westin to be accused by some critics of allying himself too closely with business interests.)

Mr. Westin, who in the 1970s was editor in chief of The Civil Liberties Review, a publication of the American Civil Liberties Foundation, published and edited the newsletter Privacy & American Business from 1993 to 2006. He was a consultant on privacy issues to major corporations, including Equifax, the consumer credit reporting giant; GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical concern; and Verizon Communications.

Mr. Westin's wife died before him, as did a son, David. His survivors include a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Debra Westin; and three grandchildren.

A posthumous book by Mr. Westin, about privacy as a historically and philosophically Jewish construct, is being completed by Mr. Rosen.

In recent years, Mr. Westin turned his attention to the Niagara of personal data loosed by Google, Facebook and their ilk. Trying to stem this tide was a hopeless task, and he knew it.

"He recognized that the problems of protecting privacy are now so daunting that they can't be dealt with by law alone, but require a mix of legal, social and technological solutions," Mr. Rosen said.

The son of Irving Westin and the former Etta Furman, Alan Furman Westin was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1929; received a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Florida in 1948, followed by a law degree from Harvard in 1951; was admitted to the bar in 1952; married Bea Shapoff, a teacher, in 1954 in a ceremony in which the bride wore a waltz-length white gown; joined the Columbia faculty in 1959; earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 1965 (his dissertation topic was "Privacy in Western Political History"); lived for many years in Teaneck, N.J.; edited a string of books, including "Freedom Now! The Civil-Rights Struggle in America" (1964), "Information Technology in a Democracy" (1971) and "Getting Angry Six Times a Week: A Portfolio of Political Cartoons" (1979); once made a sound recording titled "I Wonder Who's Bugging You Now"; was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Congress; had a Social Security number obtained in Massachusetts; and was a registered Democrat who last voted in 2011 — all public information, obtainable online at the touch of a button or two.