LSE London, London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract
The value of informational privacy has long ceased to be seen merely in the protection or exercise of individual autonomy. Already in the early 1980s, the German Federal Court pointed out that the political autonomy of citizens in exercising their democratic rights and duties would be incompatible with a “social and legal order […], in which citizens could no longer know who knows what about them, when and on what occasion” (BVerfGE 65, 1). In this blog post, I want to highlight four dangers to democratic rule that may arise out of a society, in which privacy rights are not adequately protected or are even disregarded
