Privacy Rights In The Global Digital Economy

A rapidly evolving global digital economy has facilitated the integration of new activities, like social networking, virtual gaming, and texting, into our everyday lives. It has also placed an economic premium on the gathering of personal information that has never before existed. These everyday activities are giving rise to different forms of invasion of privacy by other individuals and private business. Historically, the government has been seen as the major threat to the privacy rights of individuals; in the global digital economy, it is also important to take seriously privacy rights threats from the private sector of the economy. This book maps the complex privacy protection landscape in Canada. Chapters address privacy rights and privacy protection, the mobilization of privacy rights in the context of social networking, the protection of children's privacy in virtual-world games, the threats of "smart" advertising, and the very current issue of cyberbullying and privacy. What is social networking? What are virtual-world games? What is cyberbullying? How are the legal problems that these engender for privacy rights part of our everyday life? What can we do about them? How could strengthening paths to justice help? These are the questions the book seeks to answer. These themes will be of interest to lawyers, academics, political scientists, criminologists, and those with an interest in public policy, access to justice, international relations, and the relationship of law and society.

Experts from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, explore five potential paths to privacy protection.

Increasingly, we conduct our lives online, and in doing so, we grant access to our personal information. The crucial feedstock of the world economy thus generated - the commercialization and exploitation of personal data and the intrusion of digital privacy it entails - has built an imposing edifice of market power. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, this detailed exploration of the interlinkage between competition and data privacy takes a critical look at competition policy to evaluate whether the system in its current form and with the existing approach is capable of tackling the challenges raised by the role of personal data in the shift from an offline to an online economy.

Americans have always cherished our privacy. From the birth of our republic, we assured ourselves protection against unlawful intrusion into our homes and our personal papers. At the same time, we set up a postal system to enable citizens all over the new nation to engage in commerce and political discourse. Soon after, Congress made it a crime to invade the privacy of the mails. And later we extended privacy protections to new modes of communications such as the telephone, the computer, and eventually email.

Information and Privacy Law in Canada explores how we can access information held by public bodies, what governments and other organizations can do with information about us, and how we can use the courts or other mechanisms to hold others accountable when they violate our privacy or misuse our personal information.

This book offers a broad and incisive analysis of the governance of privacy protection with regard to personal information in contemporary advanced industrial states. Based on research across many countries, it discusses the goals of privacy protection policy and the changing discourse surrounding the issue, concerning risk, trust and social values.

From credit-card purchases to electronic fingerprints, the amount of personal data available to government and business is growing exponentially. All industrial societies face the problem of how to regulate this vast world of information, but their governments have chosen distinctly different solutions. In Protectors of Privacy, Abraham L. Newman details how and why, in contrast to the United States, the nations of the European Union adopted comprehensive data privacy for both the public and the private sectors, enforceable by independent regulatory agencies known as data privacy authorities. Despite U.S. prominence in data technology, Newman shows, the strict privacy rules of the European Union have been adopted far more broadly across the globe than the self-regulatory approach championed by the United States. This rift has led to a series of trade and security disputes between the United States and the European Union. Based on many interviews with politicians, civil servants, and representatives from business and NGOs, and supplemented with archival sources, statistical analysis, and examples, Protectors of Privacy delineates the two principal types of privacy regimes-comprehensive and limited. The book presents a theory of regulatory development that highlights the role of transgovernmental networks not only in implementing rules but also in actively shaping the political process surrounding policymaking. More broadly, Newman explains how Europe's institutional revolution has created in certain sectors the regulatory capacity that allows it to challenge U.S. dominance in international economic governance.

Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly boundaryless options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries. Online practices of business and government agencies may present new ways to compromise privacy, and e-commerce and technologies that make a wide range of personal information available to anyone with a Web browser only begin to hint at the possibilities for inappropriate or unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively? This book seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions one takes and the privacy policies that are enacted, and provides a variety of tools and concepts with which debates over privacy can be more fruitfully engaged. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age focuses on three major components affecting notions, perceptions, and expectations of privacy: technological change, societal shifts, and circumstantial discontinuities. This book will be of special interest to anyone interested in understanding why privacy issues are often so intractable.