Two notable decisions in Europe reflect the tension between privacy and free speech.
The European Court of Human Rights came down on the side of press freedom — thus speech — when it ruled in favor of media reporting on public figures. And a Dutch court ruled that journalists had a right to interview a Nazi murderer with hidden cameras.
This tension is addressed but only glancingly in the EU’s proposed rules on privacy, which create vague carve-outs for journalism, history, and scientific research.
What none of this acknowledges at a more fundamental level the right we have to talk about someone else (with carve-outs for libel and slander already in the law) — not just the press and not just public figures. If you tell me I must forget you and erase what I have said about you, then you affect my speech. If you reveal something to me and I interact with that information and then you claim the right to pull back your information, then we must debate about who has rights to the results of our interaction (whether that is a conversation or a transaction).
Privacy isn’t as simple as some of its advocates would lead us to believe. It is interweaved with other rights and interactions.
I’ve been studying the full proposed EU privacy regulations and now I’m going through ancillary documents. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
