Privacy and Data Protection (original) (raw)

2020, Oxford University Press eBooks

Working with computing systems, whether developing, integrating, or testing them, will often involve working with data. Sometimes this data will be personal data, and sometimes these systems will have a major impact on the private life of those targeted by these systems (think of data brokers, credit rating agencies), or those interacting with these systems (in the case of social networks, search engines). In this chapter, we will investigate the legal domain of privacy and data protection, which entails a series of legal requirements for the development and design, for the default settings, and for the employment of computer architectures. This chapter can in no way provide a comprehensive overview of privacy and data protection, which would require two separate books at the least. However, the purpose of this book is not to turn computer scientists into lawyers. The purpose is to provide some real taste and true bite of the law on legal topics that are highly relevant for computer science. Therefore, please check the references for further reading and for real world scenarios check with a practising lawyer. The right to privacy is a subjective right, attributed by objective law. This may be national (constitutional) law, international human rights law, or supranational law (EU fundamental rights law). In this chapter, we will first confront the landscape of human rights law at the global, national, and EU level, followed by a discussion of the concept of privacy. We will then inquire into the right of privacy, as guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU), and finally, we will target the new fundamental right to data protection, as guaranteed by the CFREU and protected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 5.1 Human Rights Law When tracing the history of human rights, we first encounter the English Bill of Rights of 1689, followed by the revolutionary French Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen of 1789 and the US Bill of Rights of 1791. Though the famous Magna Charta of 1215 may seem an early example of a '[K] nowledge is an affair of making sure,' Dewey observed, 'not of grasping antecedently given sureties.' This is what the courts must achieve every time a case is brought before them: making the difference that makes a difference. 5.2.2 Privacy and technology After tracing the conceptual challenges of delineating privacy, I will briefly trace the relationship between privacy and technology. Some of us may think that privacy is a property of people in general, just like animals often display what ethologists call 'critical distance' from each other. Privacy, according to environmental psychologist Altman, is a matter of shaping and negotiating borders between self and others. It is not a property of a person, but of a relationship.