Suchergebnisse

PUBLISHED ; In this contribution, I identify the essence of the right to the protection of personal data as understood in EU law. The essence is a fundamental step in defining the permissible limitations of the right; it works as a theoretical border, the trespassing of which leads to the automatic violation of the right. I claim that, in order to find the essence, it is first of all necessary to trace the contours of the right to the protection of personal data. In its case law on the protection of personal, the CJEU has hitherto followed a susbstantive approach to the essence of Article 8 of the Charter withouth, however, providing indications on how it reached its conclusions. I therefore supplement the scant case law of the CJEU with work on indicators developed by the OHCHR, which provides a method for identifying attributes of rights from which I distil the essence. While the final definition of the essence largely depends on the findings of the CJEU, nevertheless this does not imply that discussing the essence is taboo. This is because defining, even if temporarily, the content of the essence and related attributes has relevance beyond the courtroom. The proposed attributes and essence can help in gaining granularity when analysing the intrusiveness of technologies on the right to the protection of personal data (and other rights), and support data protection by design approaches.

In the wake of high profile and recent events of blatant privacy violations, which also raise issues of democratic accountability as well as, at least potentially, undermining the legitimacy of current local and international governance arrangements, a rethinking of the justification of the right to privacy is proposed. In this paper, the case of the violation of the privacy of a bullied autistic youngster and the consequent prosecution of 3 Google executives will be discussed first. We will then analyse the arguments made by both academic experts and pundits who agree with Google's claim that if the first sentence had been left unchallenged, it would have opened the floodgates to several other jurisdictions that would as a consequence have used it as a pretext to increase control on the internet, jeopardising in such a way free speech, which has been seen so far as an inalienable right which should not be censored. Finally, by going beyond the sentences and their immediate contexts, we will propose a theoretical justification of our analysis. Our main claim is that the value of the right to privacy is based on the argument that its violation would undermine citizens' capacity to participate effectively in democratic politics. ; Na esteira dos recentes e importantes eventos de flagrantes violações da privacidade, é proposto um repensar da justificativa do direito à privacidade, pois tais violações levantam questões de responsabilidade democrática e, ao menos potencialmente, contribuem para corroer a legitimidade das atuais organizações de governança locais e internacionais. Neste artigo, discutir-se-á primeiramente o caso da violação da privacidade de um jovem autista intimidado (bullied) e o consequente julgamento de três executivos do Google. Depois, serão analisados os argumentos dos especialistas, acadêmicos ou não, que concordam com a afirmação do Google de que, se a primeira sentença não tivesse sido contestada, as comportas para várias outras jurisdições teriam sido abertas e, como consequência, serviriam como pretexto para aumentar o controle na internet, comprometendo a liberdade de expressão enquanto direito inalienável que não deveria ser censurado. Por fim, além das sentenças e dos seus contextos imediatos, propõe-se uma justificativa teórica da análise exposta. O principal argumento consiste no valor do direito à privacidade estar baseado na leitura de que sua violação prejudicaria a capacidade dos cidadãos de participar efetivamente da política democrática.