The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age

Completed in May 2016

The digital age offers unique opportunities to strengthen human rights implementation and monitoring and has transformed the means through which human rights are exercised. Equally, the digital age poses unique challenges in ensuring that states and businesses respect and protect our rights in the digital forum. The full extent of the human rights implications of the digital age remains unknown.

This project aimed at examining the international human rights law framework in relation to the right to privacy, and identifying challenges raised by modern communication technologies; examining the extent to which domestic and extraterritorial surveillance may infringe an individual’s right to privacy; and identifying ways forward to ensure the protection and promotion of the right to privacy.

Research Team

This research project was carried out by Alice Priddy, former researcher at the Academy.

OUTPUT

In 2014, in partnership with the Permanent Missions of Austria, Brazil, Germany, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Norway, and Switzerland, the Geneva Academy hosted the experts meeting ‘The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age’.

The meeting was held to: examine the international human rights law framework in relation to the right to privacy, and identify challenges raised by modern communication technologies; foster understanding of how the right to privacy is implemented by governments, as well as the private sector and civil society; examine the extent to which domestic and extraterritorial surveillance may infringe an individual’s right to privacy; and identify ways forward to ensure the protection and promotion of the right to privacy.

 

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Right On: Contact Tracing and Challenges to Privacy

6 May 2020, 15:00-16:30

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