Legal Protection Of The Right To Privacy In Information Society

The concept of the right to privacy has a history of more than 100 years since it was first put forward by the American jurist Warren and Brandeis. As a new type of right, it has been changing constantly over 100 years. This thesis attempts to study the right to privacy from a new angle. The author has defined the right to privacy at first, after that, the author described the status of right to privacy in the information society. Through comparing the current legal protection situation of the right to privacy of the world at last, the author then put forward some suggestions to the construction of the future legal system of the right to privacy in china.This thesis is divided into four parts. The first part is about how to define the right to privacy. The author thinks that the prerequisite to define the right to privacy is to know what privacy is. As the different definitions of privacy determine the difference of the concept of right to privacy. In fact, privacy is a kind of information, but not other. So, the right to privacy can be defined as the right to protect natural person's body and privately owned space from being infringed and controlling to one's own information.Then the author gives a definition to the main nature of the right to privacy. Traditional theory about the right to privacy thinks that the right to privacy is a kind of passive right, others can't infringe their secret or peaceful life. This means that the function of the right to privacy is mainly for the purpose of defence, but in the information society, it is very difficult to protect our privacy depending on this kind of passive functions of the right to privacy. So the subject of the right should be given the power to control his own information. This kind of control power shows mainly: Conceal, disclose right; rational utilization right; Know, revises right. In addition, the author thinks that we should acknowledge the proprietary attribute of the right to privacy, this can give our information more perfect protection against the abuse by others.The second part describes the position of right to privacy in the information society. Facing the information society with powerful momentum and the omnipresent Internet, our privacy are fewer and fewer, the new advanced technology opened convenient door to infringe the right to privacy constantly. Our privacy will often be infringed by way of not letting us perceived. The following areas are the most likely to be encroached in theinformation society: First, the infringement of the personal information by the government and other unit. Second, the unlawful use of customer's materials by the commercial department. Third, eavesdropping and taking photos secretly. Fourth, the development of gene technology brings serious social problems .In the information society, Internet is widely applied to nearly every part of our society, which making the economic mode and the behavior of society taking place enormous change that difficult to imagine, only meets this kind of change can the law promotes the progress of our society and protect the citizen's fundamental right from being infringed constantly. The right to privacy should play a positive role in the information society and become the basic right in the legal system of information society.The third part is the comparative analysis to the legal protection of right to privacy in the world. As a common law country, through accumulations of more than a century, the U.S.A. developing a huge legal protection system of the right to privacy, both written law and legal precedent law protect the right to privacy in an all-round way. The written law is mainly about to protect the personal materials, Law of legal precedent is used for protecting the right to privacy that seldom involves the personal materials. As the same common law countries, Britain's mainly law to protect the right to privacy is the personal data protection law, the protection of the right to privacy in the law of legal precedent is only a kind of indirect protection. Germany, as r...