The Legal Challenges of the Information Revolution and the Principle of “Privacy by Design”

The chapter examines how the information revolution impacts on the field of data protection in a twofold way. On the one hand, the scale and amount of cross-border interaction taking place in cyberspace, illustrate how the information revolution affects basic tenets of current legal frameworks, such as the idea of the law as a set of rules enforced through the menace of physical sanctions and matters of jurisdiction on the internet. On the other hand, many impasses of today’s legal systems on data protection, liability and jurisdiction, can properly be tackled by embedding normative constraints into information and communication technologies, as shown by the principle of privacy by design in such cases as information systems in hospitals, video surveillance networks in public transports, or smart cards for biometric identifiers. Normative safeguards and constitutional constraints can indeed be embedded in places and spaces, products and processes, so as to strengthen the rights of the individuals and widen the range of their choices. Although it is unlikely that “privacy by design” can offer the one-size-fits-all solution to the problems emerging in the field, it is plausible that the principle will be the key to understand how today’s data protection-issues are being handled.