Right to Privacy: Tracing The Evolution of Privacy in The Digital Age

References

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[2] David Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (Perseus Books, 1998).

[3] David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Open University Press, 2001).

[4] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019) ch. 1.

[5] Ibid., 361 (Harlan J., concurring).

[6] Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).

[7] Terry Hutchinson & Nigel Duncan, 'Defining and Describing What We Do: Doctrinal Legal Research' (2012) 17 Deakin Law Review 83.

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[12] Ibid., per Douglas J.

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[14] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), subsequently overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).

[15] Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

[16] European Convention on Human Rights (1950), Article 8.

[17] Malone v. United Kingdom (1984) 7 EHRR 14.

[18] Handyside v. United Kingdom (1976) 1 EHRR 737.

[19] Halford v. United Kingdom (1997) 24 EHRR 523.

[20] S and Marper v. United Kingdom (2009) 48 EHRR 50.

[21] Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, AIR 1963 SC 1295.

[22] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1.

[23] M.P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra, AIR 1954 SC 300.

[24] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, para 323 (Chandrachud J.).

[25] Ibid., para 295.

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[30] Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. Section 6501 et seq. (1998).

[31] Video Privacy Protection Act, Pub. L. 100-618, 102 Stat. 3195 (1988).

[32] Peter P. Swire & Lauren Faith Rein, 'US Protection of Personal Information: Current Approaches and the Long-Term Challenge' in Graham Greenleaf (ed.), Asian Data Privacy Laws (OUP, 2014).

[33] Article 29 Working Party, Guidelines on Data Protection Impact Assessment (wp243rev.01, 2017).

[34] GDPR, Articles 6, 7, 17, 20, 25, 35 and 83.

[35] Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data.

[36] Case C-131/12, Google Spain SL v. Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos [2014] ECR I-317 (CJEU).

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[39] Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act (USA FREEDOM Act), Pub. L. 114-23 (2015).

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[41] UN Human Rights Council, Resolution 28/16, 'The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age' (26 March 2015).

[42] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, para 180 (Chandrachud J.).

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[48] Sandra Wachter & Brent Mittelstadt, 'A Right to Reasonable Inferences' (2019) 2019 Columbia Business Law Review 494.

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[50] Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), OJ L, 12.7.2024.

[51] Joy Buolamwini & Timnit Gebru, 'Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification' (2018) Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81.

[52] EU AI Act, Articles 5, 10, 26.

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[54] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (Aadhaar Case), (2019) 1 SCC 1.

[55] Ibid., para 389 (Sikri J.).

[56] Ibid., para 389 (Sikri J., majority opinion).

[57] Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press, 2010).

[58] Alessandro Acquisti & Jens Grossklags, 'Privacy and Rationality in Individual Decision-Making' (2005) 3(1) IEEE Security & Privacy 26.

[59] danah boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale University Press, 2014) 57.

[60] Ibid., 418 (Sotomayor J., concurring).

[61] United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012).

[62] Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979).

[63] Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).

[64] Ibid., 320 (Roberts CJ.).

[65] Ibid., 320 (Roberts CJ., majority opinion).

[66] GDPR, Article 17 (Right to Erasure / Right to be Forgotten).

[67] Jonathan Zittrain, 'Don't Force Google to Forget' The New York Times, 14 May 2014.

[68] Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637.

[69] Re: Pegasus Project, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 314 of 2021 (Supreme Court of India, 27 October 2023).

[70] GDPR, Article 5 (Principles Relating to Processing of Personal Data).

[71] Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford University Press, 2020) 149.

[72] GDPR, Articles 15-22.

[73] Data Protection Commission (Ireland), Decision re Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, DPC-E-2-2022 (22 May 2023).

[74] Lilian Edwards, 'The EU Data Act: A Solution in Search of a Problem?' (2022) 22 Computer Law Review International 133.

[75] Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee, A Free and Fair Digital Economy: Protecting Privacy, Empowering Indians (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, 2018).

[76] Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (No. 22 of 2023).

[77] Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, Report (Lok Sabha Secretariat, December 2021).

[78] Vrinda Bhandari & Rishika Sahgal, 'An Analysis of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023' (2023) 58(42) Economic and Political Weekly 17.

[79] Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Bart van der Sloot & Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, 'The European Union General Data Protection Regulation: What It Is and What It Means' (2019) 28 Information & Communications Technology Law 65.

[80] California Privacy Rights Act (Proposition 24), Cal. Civ. Code Section 1798.99.10 et seq. (2020).

[81] California Consumer Privacy Act, Cal. Civ. Code Section 1798.100 et seq. (2018).

[82] American Data Privacy and Protection Act, H.R. 8152, 117th Congress (2022).

[83] Aharon Barak, Proportionality: Constitutional Rights and their Limitations (Cambridge University Press, 2012) ch. 4.

[84] European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Surveillance by Intelligence Services: Fundamental Rights Safeguards and Remedies in the EU (FRA, 2017) 45.

[85] Centrum for Rattvisa v. Sweden (2021) 74 EHRR 38.

[86] Marietje Schaake, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton University Press, 2024) ch. 5.

[87] Cynthia Dwork, 'Differential Privacy: A Survey of Results' (2008) Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4978.

[88] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019) ch. 1.

[89] Dorothy E. Roberts, 'Digitizing the Carceral State' (2019) 132 Harvard Law Review 1695.

[90] Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St Martin’s Press, 2018) ch. 2.

[91] Khiara Bridges, 'Privacy Rights and Public Families' (2011) 34 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender 113.

[92] Woodrow Hartzog, Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard University Press, 2018) 23.

[93] Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (Random House, 2000); Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2008).

[94] Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, para 310 (Chandrachud J.).

[95] Julie E. Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019) 212.

[96] Lina M. Khan, 'Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox' (2017) 126 Yale Law Journal 710.

@article{1719397,
      author = {Ankush Singla},
      title = {Right to Privacy: Tracing The Evolution of Privacy in The Digital Age},
      journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
      year = {2026},
      volume = {10},
      number = {1},
      pages = {15-25},
      issn = {2456-8880},
      url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1719397.pdf},
      abstract = {Privacy, considered by many as a basic right, has always been evolving and changing in the digital world and will keep changing at an even faster pace. Over the years the concept of the right to privacy has been tested, stretched and reimagined in the context of technology changes in America's case law. This paper examines the right to privacy in four general periods: common law era, constitutional era, first digital disruption era, and the era of ubiquitous surveillance, algorithmic profiling and artificial intelligence. The paper discusses critically some of the important cases of the United States Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of India that have affected the privacy jurisprudence in the respective jurisdictions. It examines data protection laws in the EU (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)), India (e.g., the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023) and some of the major challenges and issues for privacy in the platform economy, biometric surveillance and AI, and assesses their relevance and effectiveness. The paper highlights three tensions that are present in modern privacy law, namely privacy vs security in a mass surveillance world, privacy vs innovation in a data economy and privacy vs enforcing privacy rights in a broader power dynamic, such as a technology platform. It adopts comparative constitutional law to craft a reconceptualised notion of privacy in the current digital world as shaped by the principle of dignitary autonomy, a risk-based notion of the proportionality of data-processing, and structural duties of non-state and state actors.},
      keywords = {Right to Privacy, Digital Age, Surveillance, Data Protection, Fundamental Rights, GDPR, Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, Informational Self-Determination, Bodily Autonomy, Cyber Law, Artificial Intelligence, Constitutional Morality.},
      month = {July},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV10I1-1719397}
  }