Protecting Personal Information The Right to Privacy Reconsidered

The right to privacy has been applied promiscuously to an alarmingly wide-ranging assortment of issues including free speech, political consent, abortion, contraception, sexual preference, noise, discrimination and pornography. The conventional definition of privacy is unable to deal effectively with the technological advances that have significantly altered the way information is collected, stored and communicated. Social media poses searching questions about the use and protection of personal information and reveal the limits of conceiving the right to privacy as synonymous with data protection. The recent European Union's GDPR seeks to enforce greater protection of personal information, but the overlap with privacy has further obscured its core meaning. This book traces these troubling developments, and seeks to reveal the essential nature of privacy and what privacy is not.