The Impact of Digital Technology on the Right to Privacy

The Impact of Digital Technology on the Right to Privacy
Introduction
One of the major contentious issues related to digital technology is privacy. It is important to understand the implications of digital technology on the privacy rights of individuals online. With increased connectivity to the internet, the amount of data collected by digital technologies continues to rise and this raises pertinent privacy issues. While the collection of data by digital companies plays a role in improving user experience, there are no comprehensive guidelines or regulations regarding data usage. Apart from improving user experience, digital companies also utilize data collected for marketing purposes as they seek to be profitable in the competitive digital space. Given the usefulness of personal data collected by companies online, there is a risk that it can be sold and even stolen by malicious attackers. Therefore, the advancement of digital technologies seems to have serious implications for privacy rights, and legislations appear not to be catching up with them. It is thus important to examine how digital technologies impact the privacy rights of digital consumers to develop potential interventions to promote a more coherent digital environment. While the advancement of digital technology has opened many opportunities, it has threatened the right to privacy by outpacing privacy laws, increasing the risk of misuse of personal information, and exposing individuals to surveillance.
Literature Review
Privacy Legislation has been outpaced by Digital Technology
The digital world is growing at an exponential rate and with it the level of privacy that users have to give up to access products and services. As the adoption of technological devices increases and more people become connected, the challenge of digital privacy continues. Unfortunately, as technology keeps growing exponentially, legislation meant to oversee the digital platforms are still lagging. As a result, the gap between digital technologies and legislation keeps increasing. This exposes consumers to privacy risks that come with the use of such technologies. In essence, the advancement of digital technology has outpaced privacy legislation as evidenced by lack of comprehensive laws by the U.S. Congress, the inapplicability of the use of reasonable expectation of privacy test, and the insufficiency of the provisions of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect privacy rights.
Lack of Comprehensive Laws by the U.S. Congress. Unger (2020) examines how the U.S. Congress has failed to enact comprehensive legislation to protect personal information despite there being numerous data security and privacy failures. According to the author, the last few years have seen federal regulators scrutinize business organizations for deceptive or poor privacy practices, one such company being Facebook. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined the giant technology company Facebook $5 billion for its deceptive practices in regards to privacy controls. As pointed out by Unger (2020), Facebook misrepresented to consumers the extent to which they had control of their privacy settings, the procedure they could follow when implementing privacy controls, and...