14 DAY TRIAL // A British senior judge admitted that the law on privacy may have to be rewritten because of how fast the world has evolved and how things have changed due to the existence of the Internet.
The Guardian reports that Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, president of the Supreme Court, said that the speed with which information could be recorded, disseminated and manipulated nowadays led to some “enormous” challenges for the law.
For instance, law officers in the UK have had quite a few cases that have left them struggling with situations common in the world of the Internet. For instance, there have been cases of celebrities which were published in other countries and were available online, but which local media was banned from using.
That being said, the judge considers that the law on privacy should be redesigned to accommodate the changes.
The UK doesn’t have a single privacy law, so judges often use the Human Rights Act as a guideline, most often than not referring to the “right to private and family life.”
“The other point arises from the consequences of the astonishing developments in IT: the ease with which information can be transmitted and received across the world, the ease with which words and scenes can be clandestinely recorded, and the ease with which information can be misrepresented or doctored. These developments may make it inevitable that the law on privacy, indeed, the law relating to communications generally, may have to be reconsidered. It undermines the rule of law if laws are unenforceable. There is no doubt that these technological developments give rise to enormous challenges for people involved in the law and people involved in the media,” said Lord Neuberger.
There is a high concern that creating a privacy law would leave room for plenty of issues. For instance, it could be used against journalists trying to expose corruption and other illegal deeds, or it could simply damage the freedom of expression.
In fact, Judge Neuberger sees the right to privacy as an aspect of freedom of expression, but even so it can cause some friction. He offered an example by saying that a person might want to keep various things said in court as private, while a newspaper may wish to publish what was said. In this situation, these are competing claims, each based on freedom of expression.
Whether there’s going to be a privacy law in the UK remains to be seen. However, it’s interesting that the topic is being brought up now, following more than a year of NSA revelations which also involve the GCHQ. The speed of information dissemination over the Internet hasn’t exactly changed too much in the past few years, so it couldn’t be an issue of reaching a critical point. Most likely, the fact that the entire world debates on the topic of privacy due to the NSA scandal is what brought up the suggestion to create a privacy law in the UK.