Is Privacy a Useful Concept. Critically Assess.

Abstract

In today’s technology obsessed world, it’s very difficult for a person or any legal entity to ignore the matters affecting their privacy. It is to be noted that, ‘the internet has 1,700 million users and nearly 187 million web pages’, therefore we can say that the globe is being fed by the world’s biggest source of information online. Due to the internet’s immense popularity and usage, a lot of new problems and challenges came into existence, one of the most prominent amongst them is Privacy. This essay begins with explaining the meaning and the scope of the term privacy. It is important to know that the relationship between the real/ physical world and the cyber world is evolving and is still under the transition phase. The transition is challenging traditional rules, norms, and practices and developing new tensions in the field of privacy. Therefore, the second part elaborates on the importance of the concept of privacy for individuals, business houses and government thereby depicting the dependence of human beings on the virtual world. Then subsequently, part third explains the legal development which has taken palace over the years in the U.K and the U.S to address the issue of privacy. The attention is then brought modern day challenges of privacy in Part 4 of the essay and constraints within the laws to provide a prudent solution. If one critically examines this part, the common cause of easy data circulation fueling these problems can be easily noticed. It is argued that the relationship between service providers and the users was healthy until stories like that of ‘Cambridge Analytica’ were discovered. These types of cases have taken the tension around ‘Privacy’ to the next level and made the users consider important questions, to what extent they are being tracked or traced. The essay concludes with the argument that rules and regulations to cater to privacy concerns are still sketchy and under development. Hence, new laws and regulations are required to solve problems. More importantly, saying that privacy is and will remain an important concept as ever-evolving technology has become an inevitable part of our system.