Perspectives on Privacy: Increasing Regulation in the USA, Canada, Australia and European Countries

Citation

Stephanie Wical (2015), "Perspectives on Privacy: Increasing Regulation in the USA, Canada, Australia and European Countries", Online Information Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 440-441. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0123

This collection of essays addresses privacy policies in Europe, Australia, the United States and Canada.

Weaver and Friedland (“Privacy and the Fourth Amendment”) observe that the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution limits what the government can do and that it was not crafted to deal with private entities, which make up the majority of threats to individual privacy. This chapter discusses cases in which people suspected of wrongdoing were tracked with GPS devices and how the court defines “search” in various contexts. Bradley (“A Two-Dog Term”) discusses the use of police dogs and what courts have considered probable cause and what is permissible.

Reichel and Lind (“Regulating Data Protection within the European Union”) describe the European Union’s 1995 Data Protection Directive. Indra Spiecker Dohmann describes the failure of the Directive to deal with the complexity of privacy concerns ushered in by the Internet and notes that “no such thing as an “international” (personal) data protection law exists, not even an agreed upon international standard”, even though there are organisations for banking data (SWIFT) and exchange of information related to criminal matters (Europole). This chapter echoes Weaver and Friedland’s observation that the threat to privacy has increasingly come from private organisations. Schiedermair (“The new General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union – Will it Widen the Gap between Europe and the US?”) mentions the failure of the Data Protection Directive to harmonise the data protection policies and practices of European Union member states and that the directive does not have a remedy anything like the German constitutional complaint (Verfassungsbeschwerde), thus making reform necessary.

Dorr and Stephan (“The Google Autocomplete Function and the German General Right of Personality”) discuss the court cases against Google for Google’s autocomplete function. Two different individuals, both lacking understanding of from where the suggested search terms come, sued. One sought to prevent the word “prostitution” from appearing next to her name. The other individual sued in an attempt to prevent the words “fraud” and “Scientology” from appearing as suggested terms when searching a business he owned. Austin writes about the “information intermediary” role of Internet service providers in her chapter, “Lawful Access and the Discretion to Disclose”.

Several chapters have an Australian focus: Allars (“Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Information: evolving privacy regulation in Europe and Australia”) describes the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s 2004 Privacy Framework and outlines the nine principles involved; Witzleb (“Employee Monitoring and Surveillance under Australian Law: The Need for Workplace Privacy Legislation”) describes employee monitoring and surveillance in Australia and describes some cases in which unions successfully negotiated the least invasive drug testing for employees; and the final chapter, by Kumar and Rolph (“An Appetite for Suppression: Non-Publication Orders, Open Justice and the Protection of Privacy”) addresses factors of importance to open justice rulings in Australia.

This collection of papers offers an eclectic range of views from the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia on privacy and regulation that should be of interest to postgraduates working on issues related to information policy and law students interested in matters of privacy.