through European Union Directives, for example, have broken new
ground, yet these are still a long way from being able to control the
complex issues of privacy on the Internet and in cyberspace (Lessig 2000 ).
The third aspect isstatedata collections and the opportunity these provide
for misuse through discrimination. The problems and dangers of state
control have become particularly manifest in recent years with anti-terrorist
legislation both in the United States and in European countries. As is well-
known, one of the principles of recent state politics in all these countries has
been to avert the threat of terrorism by constant improvements in identiW-
ability; in other words, imposing increased restrictions on informational
privacy and thus also on civil rights and liberties. The rationality of this
approach is hotly disputed, and the dangers of the progressive erosion of
individual liberty in Western democracies have been repeatedly underlined.
At this point, however, it emerges that society is fundamentally ambiva-
lent when it comes to privacy, for although public discussion in recent
years has made it plain that restrictions in informational privacy also entail
restrictions in civil liberties, the level of public protest has been moderate:
there has not been a mass movement to protect informational privacy.
People, it seems, are willing to pass on their data in business dealings and
when shopping on the Internet as well. Finally, it is clear that many citizens
themselves attach much less importance to the protection of informational
privacy in the media (for example) than is being called for in political
theory and by civil rights movements. This is evidenced by such phenom-
ena as reality TV.
4.3 Local Privacy
With local privacy we have come to the classic, traditional place of privacy,
its most genuine locus: one’s own home, which for many people still
intuitively represents the heart of privacy. It is within our own four walls
that we can do just what we want, unobserved and uncontrolled. Yet it
should be made clear from the outset that local privacy is not derived from
a ‘‘natural’’ separation of spheres, but from the idea that one of the vital
conditions for protecting individual freedoms in modern liberal democra-
cies is to be able to withdraw to one’s own four walls. This has nothing to
do with ‘‘nature,’’ but a great deal to do with the notion that (culturally or
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