What is privacy (and why do we desperately need it)?
How were the GDPR and the other privacy laws born? It’s not as if people who write European standards decided to govern the subject of personal data processing in this way just to make life tough for all European businesses, organizations, and experts. No, the history of the protection of personal information begins far before the EU, long before the privacy code, and most importantly, begins in the late nineteenth century in the United States, when privacy was discussed for the first time.
Caution – spoiler
Personal data protection and privacy are not identical. They are commonly thought to be essentially equal, but as we will show, this is not the case.
I am referring to the late 1800s in the US, when two attorneys, Warren and Brandeis, wrote the first essay on the right to privacy in the Harvard Law Review.
Consider Boston at the turn of the century. Carriages can still be found. The radio is basically...
