The socio-legal context of privacy

Abstract

Privacy rights are growing apace, as can be seen from a continuing stream of judgments from UK and European courts, the rise of special interest privacy groups and other institutions tasked to protect privacy. Privacy has – its proponents suggest – at last arrived as a fully fledged legal right. However, despite these advancements, I suggest that privacy is becoming less prevalent in society; primarily because of technological and cultural changes, but also because the technical legal implementation of privacy is highly problematic. In this article it is argued that this seeming paradox should be more critically examined by socio-legal researchers who, to date, have done little to test the assertions and assumptions of the privacy lobby. This article maintains that there is a need for more investigation of the basis and assumptions behind data protection and privacy law and that a more robust analysis of the claims and rhetoric for these rights will change our attitudes towards privacy developments. The sociological conception that ‘underlying all social interaction there seems to be a fundamental dialectic’ will be used to undermine the legal notion of privacy as an individualistic ‘fundamental right’.