Data Protection and Privacy: Digitalisation, Power, and the Transatlantic Divide

This book is devoted to exploring the concepts of data protection and privacy.It addresses the fundamental questions of what is meant by the concepts of privacy, data protection, and the right to informational self-determination, and what values, goods, or interests they are purported to protect.To answer these questions, the book draws on philosophy, legal theory, and case law, providing an in-depth analysis of philosophical understandings as well as United States, European, and German jurisprudence.135 years after the first legal definition of privacy by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis as 'the right to be left alone' 1 and 50 years after Judith Jarvis Thomson's radical critique of that right, 2 it has become more urgent than ever to reflect on the meaning of privacy and reaffirm the importance of the family rights associated with it.At the heart of Thomson's irritation was the ambiguity surrounding common understandings of the right to privacy.She observed that privacy seemed to refer to many different rights and that a violation of privacy could always be explained as a violation of other rights: 'The wrongness of every violation of the right to privacy can be explained without ever once mentioning it.' 3 In the interest of clarity, Thomson argued, we should abandon the concept of privacy as a separate right and instead focus on the other rights that are directly violated.Today, we can consider ourselves fortunate that we have not abandoned the protection of a specific right to privacy.Thomson's assertion that privacy means many different -and often disparate -things remains true, however, and can be extended to the right to data protection.This book analyses this complexity of meanings and conceptualisations.However, rather than seeing the different meanings of privacy and data protection as a shortcoming to be overcome by bringing them under a single overarching taxonomy, we aim to highlight the richness of these multifaceted concepts.Building on the expertise of distinguished academics and judges, past and 1 SD Warren and LD Brandeis, 'The Right to Privacy' (1890) 4 Harvard Law Review, reprinted as 'The Right to Privacy [the Implicit Made Explicit]' in FD Schoeman (ed), Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An