After the Snowden affair, the rise of social media and the sharing economy, some corporations and governments would like us to believe that ‘privacy is dead’. Privacy should not and cannot be dead as that would mean that security is also dead. It is technically impossible to construct a secure information system without privacy as a precondition. And, conversely, it is impossible to guarantee privacy without security as a precondition.
The right to privacy has been articulated in international law and in some national laws. The right to transparency – freedom of information – while unavailable in international law has increasingly become encoded in national laws as a means of holding governments to account and tackling the imbalance of power between states and citizens.
