Privacy, Data protection and Lex Informatica lecture 2

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Privacy, Data protection and Lex Informatica --
lecture 2

• Dr. Lee A. Bygrave, 10.2.2006

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Catalysts for data protection law

• Technological-organisational trends, particularly
  as regards data processing
• Public fears
• Legal factors

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Technological-organisational developments (1)

• Growth in amount of data stored
• Integration of these data
• plans for centralised data registers
• introduction of PIN systems
• national census plans
• Increased sharing of data across organisational
  boundaries
• Growth in re-use and re-purposing of data

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Technological-organisational developments (2)

• Increased risk of data misapplication
• Information quality problems
• US surveys
• tendency to ignore quality issues
• poor cognitive quality

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Technological-organisational developments (3)

• Diminishing role of data subjects in decision
  making processes affecting them
• increasing reliance on digital persona
• Increasing anonymisation of transactions
• reduction in cognitive sovereignty

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Technological-organisational developments (4)

• Causative factors see list in lecture 1
• information appetite of organisations
• economic significance of information
• IRM, data warehousing, data mining
• Appeal of IT
• enhance performance efficiency (and appearance of
  efficiency)
• fascination for the technically sweet

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Fears (1)

• Two main kinds of fears
• fears over threats to privacy and related values
• economic fears
• Three sets of first kind of fear
• Power imbalance
• Loss of control over technology
• Dehumanisation

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Fears (2)

• First kind of fears nourished by
• trauma of fascist oppression
• Watergate
• dystopian visions
• certain types of IT (mainframe computers)
• increased risk consciousness (Beck)
• Surveys of public attitudes to privacy
• what do these tell us?

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Fears (3)

• Second main kind of fear
• focuses upon potential for restricting TBDF and
  thereby trade in goods and services
• manifest particularly with OECD Guidelines, EC
  Directive on data protection, APEC Privacy
  Framework
• Data protection laws as instruments for economic
  protectionism?
• Lack of solid evidence

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Legal factors (1)

• Positive legal factors
• international human rights, especially right to
  privacy
• Art 12 UDHR, Art 17 ICCPR, Art 8 ECHR
• rights in national constitutions
• German Federal Constitutional Court -- Census Act
  decision of 1983 Hungarian Constitutional Court
  -- PIN decision of 1991
• administrative law doctrines on rule of law

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Legal factors (2)

• Positive legal factors (contd)
• right to privacy/personality in statute and case
  law
• Norwegian Supreme Court decision of 1952 on film
  screening US case law
• rules on defamation, discrimination, intellectual
  property, fair labour practices
• role of property doctrines?
• role of FOI law?

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Legal factors (3)

• Negative legal factors
• pre-existing rules found insufficient
• pre-existing rules sometimes privacy-threatening
• Swedish tradition of open government / FOI
• cross-fertilisation process
• development of data protection guarantees in
  international human rights law