The Meaning of Privacy in the Digital Era

Introduction

The current study elaborates on the shift in the conceptualisation of ‘privacy’ across time from the concrete private domain to the abstract complex and diversified concept of the ‘right to privacy’ that needs to be protected against malpractices and violations. Now, the right to privacy has incorporated the individual’s right to control own personal information although this has become quite challenging in the era of digital platforms. Accordingly, the objective of the current study is to clarify and review why there is no universal agreement about the contents of the right to privacy, and how this issue was problematic for regulating bodies. This is a very contested issue that has been aggravated by advancements in the digital technology, such as: the Internet, cloud computing, digital platforms, metaverse, etc. For instance, privacy on the Internet has been often violated as firms have illegally collected, stored and manipulated or misused customers’ information without due permission (Lambrecht et al., 2014) despite the fact that the European Parliament and Council have adopted the Directive 2009/136/EC – which advocates the ‘informed consent’ standard (Article 29/WP 188, 2011). Hence, the EU has attempted to strengthen its laws and regulations by introducing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 regarding the data industry. With the use of cloud servers, the challenge to privacy has become stronger in the time of Covid-19 pandemic where COVID-19 Electric Medical Records (CEMRs) needed to be managed and shared across the world using cloud servers. Here, the privacy of patients needed to be protected against malicious users who were trying to tamper with those records – so, technological (seeTan et al., 2021) as well as regulative (seeShachar et al., 2020) solutions have been sought to deal with this privacy problem. Again, more recently, Metaverse has become a challenge for privacy scholars as it combines both physical and virtual worlds, showing no boundaries between digital privacy and physical privacy (seeSebastian, 2022). Its applications have reached social media, education (Jeon & Jung, 2021), and smart cities (Wang et al., 2022) and modern forms of entertainment.

Regulation wise, privacy was a contagious issue across world states ranging from no appetite for regulating privacy to a very stringent privacy law such as the EU GDPR (Albakjaji et al., 2020). For instance, the US lacks a federal law that recognises and protects the right to privacy (Clayton, 2019), and more specifically the privacy of the cyberspace user (Solove & Schwartz, 2020). Meanwhile, the EU has taken a restrictive legislative approach, which extends to all who wish to use European customer data (Hoofnagle et al., 2019).

Hence, the study will briefly review how ‘privacy’ was conceptualised across history in relation to the legal context. The discussion will also explain the social value of ‘privacy’, its significance in the digital world, and its relevance to other rights of the individual. Then, privacy will be discussed from a legal perspective, emphasising it as a right of the individual that needs to be protected by a privacy law.