Introduction

The protection of personal data has moved higher on the policy agenda in business and the public sector in recent years. In part, this reflects a realisation in many countries and international organisations that an apprehensive, albeit poorly informed, public is less likely to embrace online transactions in electronic commerce and electronic government than the proponents of these innovations would wish (Raab, 1998, 2001). Insofar as the processing of personal data is also construed as a privacy issue, data protection goes beyond the instrumental value of protection for winning public trust for e-commerce and e-government (and e-voting as well), and bears closely upon central human rights and human values. This, too, has elevated privacy's status on policy agendas.

Innovations in selling goods and providing public services using electronic means, as well as in electronic payments and other systems, generate a need to authenticate and verify individual identities, entitlements and personal circumstances. Workplace and public-place surveillance through a variety of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) brings to the surface new conflicts over anonymity, identity and proper behaviour, threatening often highly prized values and conceptions of citizenship, labour, the self and society. Privacy is associated with dignity, selfhood and personality – the importance of which, however, is questioned in postmodernist debate – all of which are deemed to be potentially at risk when personal data are not protected, although privacy can be considered a social and collective value as well as an individual one. Its erosion diminishes society; its protection is a matter of public policy as well as practical activity on many fronts.

Regan (1995, 2002) has gone the furthest to develop the theory of privacy as a value for entities beyond the person (see also Schoeman, 1992). Regan (1995, p 221) argues that privacy serves important functions beyond those it performs for a given person, so that there are social interests in privacy that do not depend on the individual's subjective perception of its value. As a collective value, privacy cannot easily be provided to one person without its being enjoyed by others, and a certain minimum degree of privacy may be indivisible because of the way information and communication systems are designed.