engleski

Digital Privacy and Digital Freedom – establishing the Digital Freedom Index (DFI)

Although “privacy” as a term is rarely found in the constitutions of even highly developed nations (with exception of Switzerland), many regard privacy to be a human right. American lawyers Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis to whom the definition of privacy is usually attributed wrote that privacy is the extension of the right to life itself and that the right to life “has come to mean the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone”. That being so, it is hard not to equalise privacy to other fundamental rights. Privacy therefore should be protected and the only imaginable ground for restricting privacy is – security. It is hard to conceive another reason for which the privacy, as a fundamental right of every person, should be jeopardized. However, at this point we have reached an unexpected paradox ; by every objective measure we live in the safest time in human history (2013 UNODC Global Study on homicide shows that among the 88 countries analyzed, 67 show a decline of homicide rates in the last 15 years – from 7.1 homicides per 100, 000 people in 2003 to 6.2 in 2012). Yet, the use of “false trade- off” between privacy and security is presented more often than ever. The reason for this is the fact that the matters of privacy and personal freedoms are now more current than ever since the impairment of them is easier to achieve than ever before. Following the incredible surge in popularity and use of digital world and the emerging dependence on the IT systems, people as users of numerous applications have enabled an easier entry into their personal space. As it usually happens, making trespassing easier generally serves as an invitation for intruders. This thesis analyzes the terms privacy and freedom as well as their relation to one another after which it defends the use of digital instead of cyber- or online. Moreover, it is the author’s argument that although it is security that stands as antonym of freedom in the physical world trade-off, in the digital world it is still security that remains opposed to digital freedom and digital privacy and not digital security as one would presume. Finally, the aim of this thesis is to determine what are digital privacy and digital freedom today and inspect the level of digital freedoms in certain countries with special emphasis on a very interesting phenomenon – digital piracy and how it affects the levels of digital freedom.

Digital Privacy, Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Index

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