[Book Review] Andrea Monti and Raymond Wacks Protecting Personal Information: The Right to Privacy Reconsidered

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, the “right to be let alone” has powerfully captured the instinct that individuals wish to be afforded a zone of privacy, from which they could exclude the prying eyes of others. In their seminal article, “The Right to Privacy”, Warren and Brandeis provided substantial justification for the protection of individuals’ private lives, and this is why their proposition has endured as an origin of the normative right to privacy, and the basis for legal protection of individual privacy. This contention that individuals should be “let alone”, however, has never been a sufficient or comprehensive normative explanation of the right to privacy. Normative complexity persists, and these remain live issues, especially as information gathering purposes, and means of communication, continuously change and evolve. Monti and Wacks have provided a fresh normative taxonomy for the protection of informational privacy in Protecting Personal Information: The Right to Privacy Reconsidered, by setting out a workable catalogue of existing personal information laws and offering their own vision of the moral importance and proper reach of the right to informational privacy. Such an endeavour will be welcomed by practitioners and scholars of personal information law, regardless of whether they agree with that new vision. Show more