Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Law
Recent scholarly debates about privacy in digital markets involve two distinct domains: privacy as individual autonomy; and privacy as a social practice of information-sharing and visibility. Both domains are preoccupied with different questions but legal scholarship does not always account for their disparity. On the one hand, the autonomy scholars who study privacy are inclined to stress the manner in which privacy enables individuals to be ‘left alone’, to limit the extent of knowledge and access others have to their personal environment through information, presence, and vicinity, and thus to hold a reasonable measure of control over the way in which they can present themselves to others. On the other hand, those that we might term social privacy scholars are mostly apprehensive about how the realities of the networked social media landscape necessitate and empower individuals to share personal information to maintain a variety of contextually distinct environments that enable them to build different kinds of relationships, facilitate interactions that recognize different social expectations, and preserve different meanings of what they reveal to different people. While the literature on privacy has long distinguished between individual and social dimensions of privacy, legal scholarship in digital markets takes recourse predominantly to the insights of the former. A careful look at recent case law dealing with the market-driven implications of social media platforms’ privacy policies, however, exposes various opportunities for cross-fertilization.
View full article here: https://academic.oup.com/idpl/article/12/1/63/6403924.
Author: Adrian Kuenzler
Published in International Data Privacy Law, Oxford University Press, 2022, v. 12, n. 1, p. 63-73.