Overlooked - Liberty

Overlooked: Surveillance and personal privacy in modern Britain 5
1. Introduction
Writing about privacy presents a challenge. The subject matter is likely to change during the course
of work, through the passing of new laws and interpretations made by courts. Disparate concepts
of what ‘privacy’ is means that a single piece of work, conjoining state surveillance powers to media
privacy to genetic privacy and so on is difficult.
At the start of this work it was predicted the report would recommend a single piece of privacy
legislation. This would extend and enhance the right to privacy contained in Article 8 of the European
Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It would also address the shortfalls in protection offered by
the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). As work progressed it became apparent that attempting to
address such a range of issues in a single Act would make it cumbersome and unwieldy. Even if
desirable, the prospects of such legislation reaching the statute book would be remote. There are
also non legislative aspects of privacy protection, such as good practice, that are of great
importance. Good practice on the use of CCTV or on press reporting have a preventative benefit
preferable to legal sanction after the event.
The focus is primarily upon the public rather than private sector, this being Liberty’s traditional area
of concern. However, as is pointed out later in the work on surveillance, the relevance of the private
sector is increasing particularly in relation to the holding and dissemination of mass data.
Notwithstanding this there must be some limitation on the subject matter which is why private sector
use of data, and other private sector issues such as workplace privacy, are not considered.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, it is clear that few public policy issues will attract more
attention in the years ahead than the protection of privacy. Privacy is, to many concerned by ever
increasing state powers of information retention and sharing, a right whose time has come. To
others, privacy is seen as a hurdle preventing better law enforcement, counter-terrorism, public
services and technological advancement.
Privacy’s relatively recent arrival in the policy spotlight can be seen from the fact that those nations
with written Constitutions and entrenched Bills of Rights have different forms of protection for
privacy depending on when they were drafted. Older documents, such as the U.S. (1789), Irish
(1937) and French (1958) Constitutions do not explicitly include a right to privacy, although their