Progress Review - Privacy and Democracy: the Limits of Free Choice - Dinesh Deveraj

In an age of Big Data, is consent enough to protect your privacy?

Protecting privacy is all the more important in our age of exponentially growing personal information volumes. Yet, the dominant paradigm for regulating it—"privacy self-management”—offers insufficient protection. Privacy is insufficiently protected because consent is falsely assumed to give you meaningful control over your information. But, as social science research shows, we often consent to disclose personal information without fully understanding how it will be used—or by whom.

To address privacy self-management’s failings, “privacy as liberty” will be conceptualised to improve our protections. Recognising the limits of free choice, privacy as liberty seeks to protect our privacy even where we unwittingly give consent to personal information handling. To justify consent-independent protections, privacy harms will be conceptualised in terms of liberties lost. This reveals the critical importance of protecting privacy to maintain or expand our democratic liberties. Thus—given our age of Big Data—a link will be drawn between privacy protection, and the protection of our democratic liberties going forward.