Privacy Rights
The legal and moral claim to be left alone, tested by mass surveillance in the digital age.
The right to privacy is a principle found across many legal traditions that aims to limit government and private conduct threatening individuals' personal lives. More than 185 national constitutions refer to it. Since the global surveillance disclosures of 2013, which showed agencies such as the NSA, FBI, CIA and GCHQ carrying out mass surveillance worldwide, the right has been fiercely debated. Central questions include whether privacy can survive modern intelligence capabilities, whether it is surrendered for protection against terrorism, and how far technology companies that harvest personal data also erode it.
Quick Facts
- Udhr adopted
- 10 December 1948
- Key u.s. essay
- Harvard Law Review, 1890
Facts from the source article.
Background
The idea of an individual right traces back to the 12th century, when the Decretum Gratiani in Bologna broadened the Latin word ius from meaning what is fair to include a personal entitlement. In the United States, Samuel D. Warren II and Louis Brandeis published "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Review on 15 December 1890, describing privacy as the right to be let alone in reaction to photography and sensational journalism. Brandeis carried the idea into his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928), warning that invention let the state pry into private words. On 10 December 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights addressed privacy in Article 12, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights later protected it in Article 17.
Did You Know?
- Telephone party lines and switchboard operators made eavesdropping easy when Olmstead was decided in 1928.
- New computing technologies in the 1970s led to the Fair Information Practice Principles.
- Australia has no constitutional right to privacy but relies on the Privacy Act 1988.
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