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Balance or Trade-off? Online Security Technologies and Fundamental Rights

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Abstract

In this contribution, I will argue that the image of a balance is often used to defend the idea of a trade-off. To understand the drawbacks of this line of thought, I will explore the relationship between online security technologies and fundamental rights, notably privacy, nondiscrimination, freedom of speech and due process. After discriminating between three types of online security technologies, I will trace the reconfiguration of the notion of privacy in the era of smart environments. This will lead to an inquiry into the metaphor of the scale, building on the triple test regarding the justification of the limitation of fundamental rights such as privacy. The conclusion will be that in the case of a trade-off, infringing measures will have to be balanced by effective safeguards. No trade-off without balance.

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Notes

  1. Surveillance studies generally focus on privacy and discrimination issues generated by surveillance techniques and technologies (see, e.g. the Surveillance Studies Network, at http://www.surveillance-studies.net/?page_id=119). This article starts with a brief assessment of security and other issues that may call for OSTs, before investigating their implications for our fundamental rights. On Latour’s ‘realistic realism’, which I would term ‘constructivist realism’, see Stalder (2000).

  2. If the service of a Website selling shoes suffers an attack that causes disruption in its services, this impacts its availability and may even cause financial damages. But it does not impair anybody’s safety.

  3. For instance, product liability for security vulnerabilities in software would create an entirely different incentive structure than the current one. At a more basic level, tort law and criminal liability—including the applicable law of evidence and burden of proof—determine who will invest up to what level in security measures.

  4. For example, Piret (2008) on the historical significance of the concept of sovereignty, articulated as a critique of Hannah Arendt’s critique of sovereignty. Though I do not necessarily agree with Piret on all accounts, I believe we should acknowledge that the enforcement of safety, security and human rights protection to a large extent still depends on the monopoly of violence within sovereign states (see also Hildebrandt (2013)).

  5. On monitoring based on DPI, see, e.g. Bendrath (2009). More generally on monitoring, filtering and blocking, see DeNardis (2007).

  6. On privacy as social construction, see, e.g. Cohen (2012) and Schauer (2001).

  7. See on the introduction of the script and the printing press: Goody and Watt (1963) amd Eisenstein (2005).

  8. On critical distance in animal behaviour, see Hediger (1970); on privacy as boundary negotiation, see Altman (1975).

  9. This may seem a rather strong claim. However, if our inner life is constituted by our capacity to ‘speak our mind’ after being ‘spoken to’, then another’s knowledge of our inner self may indeed be both invasive and destructive (e.g.Hudson 2005).

  10. On the emergence of an inner life as a result of language mediated interaction, see Wolf (2008), on double contingency, see Parsons (1991) and Luhmann (1996). On identity construction, see Ricoeur (1992).

  11. Art. 8.5 of the current Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC already sums up a set of conditions that applies when criminal convictions or related security measures are at stake (the same conditions return in art. 9.2(j) of the GDPR. Under the current Directive, however, these data have not been qualified explicitly as personal data whose processing is prohibited.

  12. On different theories concerning the difference between rights and interests (e.g. Edmundson 2004).

  13. This is related to the fact that contract theory concerns the institution of the monopoly of violence, that is only acceptable insofar as the state actually manages to protect its subjects from violent attack. On the complexities of, e.g. the right of resistance in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (e.g. Johari 1987, p. 388).

  14. In the context of anti-terrorism measures such as anti-money laundering, see, e.g. Passas (2006).

  15. This involves Legal Protection by Design and/or Privacy by Design (see, e.g. Hildebrandt 2011; Langheinrich 2001).

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Hildebrandt, M. Balance or Trade-off? Online Security Technologies and Fundamental Rights. Philos. Technol. 26, 357–379 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0104-0

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