Legal Protection Of The Right To Privacy In Network Environment

The utilization and popularization of network brings people fortune and puts people's privacy into an embarrassing situation at the same time. The right to privacy in the environment of network is enduring unprecedented violation and severe consequences and facing unprecedented challenges. The academic circles and the legislators have not recognized this problem yet. The author tries to suggest how to tackle this problem in this thesis. This paper contains three chapters: The first chapter generalizes the network's influence on the right to privacy. First, the author indicates the new characters of the right to privacy in the environment of network: the strengthening of its economic function, the emergence of its positive function and the form of data as the object of the right to privacy. Then the author summarizes that the infringement on the right to privacy is diversified, pervasive, technical and severe. Based on that, the author discusses network's macroscopic and microcosmic influence on legal protection of the right to privacy. Network enhances the need of legal protection of the right to privacy, for legal protection can conquer the defect of the mode of protecting by industry itself and the mode of protecting through techniques. It also makes the current legal protection of the right to privacy unable to cope with the new media at the same time. The specific influence by network is: the utilization of network enlarges the scope of legal protection of the right to privacy, strengthens technical requirement of legal protection and makes the legal protection more international. The second chapter studies legal protection of the main countries and regions in the world. First, the author introduces the situation of legal protection of America and European countries. America preferred the mode of self-protection by industry to preserve the right to privacy for the purpose of the development of e-business. As further utilization and development of network and more and more severe infringement on the right to privacy, the mode of legal protection gets people's recognition and a series of laws were made. Then the author introduces the situation of legal protection in European countries. Finally, the author analyses the legal protection of these countries and draw the conclusion that the legal protection of America is complicated, dispersed but perfect to some extend; the legal protection of European countries emphasizes the function of the government, establishes comprehensive and strict laws and sets supervising organization and system to facilitate the execution of laws. The third chapter discusses the system of our country's legal protection of the right to privacy. The author introduces the current situation of our country's legal protection of the right to privacy. Although the legal protection of the right to privacy catches people's recognition in China, it is still not systematic and not comprehensive. The legislation is dispersed into different laws, such as the constitutional law, the civil law, the criminal law, the procedural law, the administrative law, special laws and network management laws, etc. The judicial practice has no law to follow and lacks operationality. So the Supreme Court gives the right to privacy indirect protection by explaining it to apply to the regulation of the right of reputation. These administrative rules usually regulate the action of people and corporation but seldom regulate the action of the government who masters and controls abundant private information. The author thinks that the key to tackle the problem of deficiency in legal protection of the right to privacy in China is legislation, because legislation can build up the idea of privacy among people, provide legal basis for judicial practice, be propitious to combat crimes, maintenance the security of network and prevent invasion from the government. The legislation in our country can follow the route of "first integrated legislation and then respective legislation". We can establish a law of private data protection as a general rule and then establish specific rules according to the problems that the general rule can not tackle. The advantages of this route are that it can hold the development trend of privacy in the environment of network macroscopically, unify the legislative route and object and reach consistent notion about key problems. Under the guidance of the general rule, we can legislate according to the new problems appeared in different fields. Thus, these rules together constitute a consistent, in-time and perfect legal...