A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was wheth…
The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.
When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.
I think that take is short sighted. Because the next obvious step to “no right to online anonymity” is “online anonymity is illegal”, and it’s pretty obvious we’re headed that way. In that case, courts can make it pretty fucking hard to protect your right to privacy.
The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.
When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.
I think that take is short sighted. Because the next obvious step to “no right to online anonymity” is “online anonymity is illegal”, and it’s pretty obvious we’re headed that way. In that case, courts can make it pretty fucking hard to protect your right to privacy.