Right to Privacy In the Digital Age

Definition

The right to privacy is our right to keep a domain

around us, which includes all those things that
are part of us, such as our body, home, property,
thoughts, feelings, secrets and identity. The right
to privacy gives us the ability to choose which
parts in this domain can be accessed by others,
and to control the extent, manner and timing of
the use of those parts we choose to disclose.
Actions which take away privacy

In 1960 legal scholar William Prosser created the

following list of activities which can be remedied
with privacy protection:
Intrusion into a persons private space, own
affairs, or wish for solitude;
Public disclosure of personal information
about a person which could be embarrassing
for them to have revealed;
Promoting access to information about a
person which could lead the public to have
incorrect beliefs about them;
Encroaching someones personality rights, and
using their likeness to advance interests which
are not their own;
 Article 8

(1) Everyone has the right to respect for his private

and family life, his home and his correspondence.

(2) There shall be no interference by a public

authority with the exercise of this right except such
as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a
democratic society in the interests of national
security, public safety or the economic well-being of
the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime,
for the protection of health or morals, or for the
protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Privacy laws of the United States

Although the Constitution does not

explicitly include the right to privacy,
individual as well as locational privacy
are implicitly granted by the
Constitution under the 4th
amendment, the Supreme Court of
the United States has found that
other guarantees have "penumbras"
that implicitly grant a right to privacy
against government intrusion, for
example in Griswold v. Connecticut
(1965).
Mass surveillance and privacy

Since the global surveillance disclosures of 2013, the inalienable human right to privacy has been
a subject of international debate. In combating worldwide terrorism, government agencies such
as the NSA, CIA, RAW, GCHQ, and others have engaged in mass global surveillance, perhaps
undermining the right to privacy.
There is now a question as to whether the right to privacy can co-exist with the current
capabilities of government agencies to access and analyse virtually every detail of an individual's
life.
A major question is whether or not the right to privacy needs to be forfeited as part of the social
contract in order to bolster defense against supposed terrorist threats.
 The NSA's illegal surveillance techniques are leaked to the public by
one of the agency's employees, Edward Snowden, in the form of
thousands of classified documents distributed to the press.

Edward On June 5, 2013, media reports documenting the existence and

functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began
and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be
revealed was PRISM, which allows for court-approved direct access
Snowden to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts, reported from both The
Washington Post and The Guardian published one hour apart.
Barton Gellman of The Washington Post was the first journalist to

Global
report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government
urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved,
but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to
Americans.
surveillance Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a British black-ops
surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ. The
initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless
disclosures Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the
NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily, the surveillance of
French citizens' phone and Internet records, and those of "high-
profile individuals from the world of business or politics.
 KeyCorp, an analytical tool that allows for collection of
"almost anything done on the internet," was described by
The Guardian as a program that "shed light" on one of
Snowden's most controversial statements: "I, sitting at my
Edward desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant,
to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal
email."
Snowden It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of
email and instant messaging contact lists,searching email
Global content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones,
undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun and that the
agency was using cookies to "piggyback" on the same tools
surveillance used by Internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for
government hacking and to bolster surveillance."

disclosures The NSA was shown to be "secretly" tapping into Yahoo

and Google data centers to collect information from
"hundreds of millions" of account holders worldwide by
tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance
program.
The nothing to hide argument

The nothing to hide argument states that

government surveillance programs do not
threaten privacy unless they uncover illegal
activities, and that if they do uncover illegal
activities, the person committing these
activities does not have the right to keep
them private. Hence, a person who favors
this argument may state "I've got nothing to
hide" and therefore does not express
opposition to government surveillance.
An individual using this argument may say
that a person should not have worries
about government or surveillance if he/she
has "nothing to hide."
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

There was of course no way of knowing whether

you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police
plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It
was even conceivable that they watched everybody
all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did
live, from habit that became instinct -- in the
assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every
movement scrutinized.
George Orwell
The
Panopticon
The Panopticon is a type of institutional
building designed by the English philosopher
and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the
18th century. The concept of the design is to
allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be
observed (-opticon) by a single watchman
without the inmates being able to tell
whether or not they are being watched.
Although it is physically impossible for the
single watchman to observe all cells at once,
the fact that the inmates cannot know when
they are being watched means that all
inmates must act as though they are watched
at all times, effectively controlling their own
behaviour constantly.
The name is also a reference to Panoptes from
Greek mythology; he was a giant with a
hundred eyes and thus was known to be a
very effective watchman.
Data privacy

Information or data privacy refers to the

evolving relationship between technology
and the legal right to, or public expectation
of, privacy in the collection and sharing of
data about one's self.
Privacy concerns exist wherever uniquely
identifiable data relating to a person or
persons are collected and stored, in digital
form or otherwise. In some cases these
concerns refer to how data are collected,
stored, and associated. In other cases the
issue is who is given access to information.
Other issues include whether an individual
has any ownership rights to data about them,
and/or the right to view, verify, and challenge
that information.
Data
protection
Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy
concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and
displaying of information pertaining to oneself via of the Internet.
Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy.

Andrew Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel Corporation,

offered his thoughts on internet privacy in an interview in 2000:
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At
the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out
everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you
and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and
people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This
wasn't the information that people were thinking of when they called
this the information age.
Facebook
Facebook has more than 1.94 billion monthly
active users as of March 31, 2017.
Because of the large volume of data that users
submit to the service, Facebook has come under
scrutiny for its privacy policies.
Facebook may be accessed by a large
range of desktops, laptops, tablet
computers, and smartphones over the
Internet and mobile networks. After
registering to use the site, users can
create a user profile indicating their
name, occupation, schools attended and
so on.
Users can add other users as "friends",
exchange messages, post status updates
and digital photos, share digital videos
and links, use various software
applications ("apps"), and receive
notifications when others update their
profiles or make posts.
Facebook is the most popular social
networking site in the world, based on
the number of active user accounts.
Facebook classifies users from the ages
of 13 to 18 as minors and therefore sets
their profiles to share content.
 The right to be forgotten
The right to be forgotten "reflects the claim of an
individual to have certain data deleted so that third
persons can no longer trace them.
It has been defined as "the right to silence on past
events in life that are no longer occurring.
The right to be forgotten leads to allowing
individuals to have information, videos or
photographs about themselves deleted from certain
internet records so that they cannot be found by
search engines.

Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Espaola de Proteccin de

Datos, Mario Costeja Gonzlez (2014) is a decision by the Court of
Justice of the European Union (CJEU). - It held that an Internet
search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it
carries out of personal information which appears on web pages
published by third parties