When personal data, behavior and virtual identities become a commodity: Would a property rights approach matter?+

Abstract

This article attempts to grapple with the privacy debate, taking account of both the philosophical and economic arguments for and against a property right in privacy, as well as recent court cases such as the famous Douglas v Hello which arguably veer towards granting such property rights, albeit paradoxically only in the privacy of those whose living it is to be public property: namely, celebrities. The article concludes towards the idea that it is not enough to simply decide that privacy can or cannot, or should or should not, be propertised: what is truly important is to analyse the effect such would have on, for example, limitation of misuse of personal data, and efficiency of re-use of data, especially compared to conventional human rights systems of protection of privacy such as data protection law, which although good on paper, may in reality in the digitised trans-national world of the Internet offer less protection than some property rights systems.