Privacy is a human right: US and EU Privacy Laws Differ Greatly - EU must not buckle under pressures to follow US laws
In reference to a court case between the aging French Literary personality Dumas and a photographer, who had sold "risky" pictures he took of Dumas and his 32 year old Texas actress girlfriend Adah Isaacs Menken, Yale law professor James Whitman wrote in a paper titled “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty, “One’s privacy, like other aspects of one’s honor, are not a market commodity that could simply be definitively sold.” In the Dumas case the French court had decided that posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said. It was a ruling which would certainly not have been given in an American court.
EU privacy laws are very different from those in America and some of the European rulings might seem like a dream for those Americans who believe their privacy is slowly eroding.
Some of the differences between US and EU privacy include:
* Personal information cannot be collected without consumers’ permission, and they have the right to review the data and correct inaccuracies.
* Companies that process data must register their activities with the government.
* Employers cannot read employees’ private e-mail.
* Personal information cannot be shared by companies or across borders without express permission from the data subject.
* Checkout clerks cannot ask for shoppers’ phone numbers.
Those rights, and many others, stem from The European Union Directive on Data Protection of 1995, which mandated that each EU nation pass a national privacy law and create a Data Protection Authority to protect citizens' privacy and investigate attacks on it.
National European laws also come in a variety of forms based on varied traditions. But taken together, they are the backbone of a basic European principle: Privacy is a human right. European citizens should make sure this right never gets watered down by outside or internal pressures.
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