Digitalisation, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and the Constitutional Law of Privacy in South Africa: Towards a public law perspective on constitutional privacy in the era of digitalisation

Abstract

In this working paper, our focus is on the constitutional debates and case law regarding the right to privacy, adopting a method that is largely theoretical. In an accompanying separate working paper, A South African Public Law Perspective on Digitalisation in the Health Sector, we employ the analysis developed here and focus on the specific case of digital technologies in the health sector. The topic and task of these papers lie at the confluence of many areas of contemporary society. To demonstrate and apply the argument of this paper, it would be possible and valuable to extend its analysis into any of numerous spheres of social life, from energy to education to policing to child care. In our accompanying separate paper, we focus on only one policy domain – the health sector. Our aim is to demonstrate our argument about the significance of a public law perspective on the constitutional right to privacy in the age of digitalisation, and attend to several issues raised by digitalisation’s impact in the health sector. For the most part, we focus on technologies that have health benefits and privacy costs, but we also recognise that certain technologies have health costs and privacy benefits. We also briefly outline the recent establishment (and subsequent events) in South Africa of a contact tracing database responding to the COVID-19 pandemic – the COVID-19 Tracing Database – a development at the interface of the law enforcement and health sectors. Our main point in this accompanying paper is to demonstrate the value that a constitutional right to privacy can bring to the regulation of digital technologies in a variety of legal frameworks and technological settings – from public to private, and from the law of the constitution to the ‘law’ of computer coding.