Adan Liptak: America and Europe Have Very Different Ideas of Privacy
[Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent of The New York Times.]
“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services....
“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”...
“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.”...
This may sound odd in America, where the First Amendment has pride of place in the Bill of Rights. In Europe, privacy comes first.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10....
“The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Professor Cate said, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police — totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. “We haven’t really lived through that in the United States,” he said.
American experience has been entirely different, said Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France. “So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech,” he said.
It was not until 1890 that Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy,” their groundbreaking Harvard Law Review article. Influential though it was, it came awfully late in the life of the republic....
European courts, by contrast, have Article 8....
Read entire article at NYT
“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services....
“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”...
“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.”...
This may sound odd in America, where the First Amendment has pride of place in the Bill of Rights. In Europe, privacy comes first.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10....
“The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Professor Cate said, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police — totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. “We haven’t really lived through that in the United States,” he said.
American experience has been entirely different, said Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France. “So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech,” he said.
It was not until 1890 that Samuel Warren and Louis D. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy,” their groundbreaking Harvard Law Review article. Influential though it was, it came awfully late in the life of the republic....
European courts, by contrast, have Article 8....