The Privacy-technology Dilemma in the Age of Digital Surveillance

The proliferation of new technologies and their increasing use in many aspects of our lives pose a number of threats to privacy; digital networks, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, automated profiling, genetics, radio frequency identification (RFID), wiretapping, closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, digital rights management systems and similar technologies challenge the traditional confines of privacy, and on several occasions, call for its reconceptualization. In a dynamically changing technological framework one must answer the following dilemma: how to benefit from the friendly uses of technology without surrendering the individual's freedom and autonomy. The contributions that are included in the book that follows introduce exactly this dilemma, trying to propose possible solutions and answers, policies or practices that can balance the benefits of technology with the need to protect the right to privacy in an era of surveillance and digital technology. The difficult balance between technology and privacy is a subject that has already drawn the international theoretical attention. Privacy, a relatively new right—at least for many of the European legal Portugal)—has attracted the European theoretical attention over the past three decades exactly due to the rapid rise of technology. Nonetheless, the things are quite different in the other side of the Atlantic, beginning with the American theoretical dialogue on the subject initiated by the famous 'right to be left alone' of S. D. Warren and L. D. Brandeis. In their 'Right to Privacy' published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, the two authors base the necessity for acknowledging an implicit right to privacy exactly in the rise of technology and the new threats that the press casts for the freedom of the individual. In the exact same way, nowadays the network, the databanks and the technologies of surveillance present new endangerments that call for the protection of privacy. This very idea connects the chapters in this book. Technology does not only present a possible threat to privacy. It also reflects the very contours of privacy, the reason that its protection becomes a legal and social necessity. This is the reason why the expansion of technology also analogically augments the legal acknowledgment of the social appreciation of privacy. This evolution has influenced the rise of the 'public safety' international technological surveillance, the relevant bibliography on the subject of privacy and technology over the past two decades, and especially after The contributions that follow engage to this open dialogue, by offering new theoretical …