Civil Liability For Privacy Tort On The Internet

Privacy is not an emerging right. In the end of the nineteenth century, the mass media and new technologies such as photography and sound recording has spawned a legal right to privacy. And to the information society, especially the web2.0era, information technology has undergone a profound change, which creates an urgent need to update the privacy tort theory from the perspective of rules in the Internet community.As we all know, the philosophical foundation of right to privacy is the dividing line between public and private sector. Privacy, as a kind of legal right, means to protect people’s right to dominate their own personal information and personal life, excluding others from interfering in the private domain. As the rise of the network society, the he private sphere, including personal information and privacy, has been going through a huge expansion. Therefore, in the Intemet environment, privacy violations also has a new feature.The2010"Tort Liability Act" of PRC provides the general rules and principles of tort liability imputation and the ways for infringer to take liability. However, through careful analysis of the privacy violations under the network environment, we can find the traditional fault liability is not able to provide adequate protection for the privacy rights of people. In addition, according to the nature of the different functions and characters, the influence and power among different kinds of infringers varies a lot. Especially to state agencies, network equipment manufacturers, Internet service providers and other subjects, who hold a large number of Internet users’privacy information, and bears security obligations for those information, we should give special consideration on imputation principles and allocation rules of tort liability, and the ways to assume tort liability that would apply.In addition, the right to privacy has a prominent feature that once it is infringed, the consequences of the damage would never be remedied completely. Apparently, the existing civil liability system is not able to provide adequate relief for the victims of privacy infringement. Therefore, to better protect the privacy rights of citizens, the legislature and the judiciary are supposed to reform the current tort liability system and move on to make a breakthrough within a certain limits. They should increase the application of "eliminate the risk" as a way to assume tort liability in privacy infringement cases, and try to take injunction system as a applicable remedy from common law.