The Legal Issues Research Of The Protection Of Right To Online Privacy In The United States

As the production results from human civilian, the right to privacy is an important right of personality relating to people’s dignity and worth. With the advent of the Internet Age, the personal private information becomes more accessible. There is the possibility that user’s data is spied and revealed at any time from the moment that he connected to the Internet. Therefore, the production of the right to online privacy, which is the extension of the right to privacy in cyberspace, has become an important Internet problem concerned by many Internet users and experts.As the first country proposed the concept of the right to privacy and one of the most developed countries of the Internet technique in the world, the United States not only had issued an important bill, Electronic Communications Privacy, to deal with the problem of the right to online privacy, but also had adopted the way of self-regulation to protect it. Nowadays, the United States has established an sophisticated system for protecting the right to online privacy. Therefore, to China that the protection of the right to online privacy is still weak, researching the United States’ way of protecting is instructive.In the first part of this paper, the author discussed the basic theory of the right to privacy and online privacy.In the second part, the author introduced the main ways to tort against online privacy in the United States.The third part touched upon the protection system of the United States. In America, self-regulation is the main policy to protect online privacy to avoid hindering the development of the Internet technique. Meanwhile the government also drafted series of bills to make up the deficiency of self-regulation.In the forth part, the author introduced the protection system of online privacy in EU and compared it with the protection system of the United States.The fifth part is the suggestion on online privacy protection in China. Firstly, the paper introduced the current protection of the right to online privacy in China. Secondly, the author discussed the instructive significance of researching the protection of the right to online privacy of the United States to our country.