Privacy: A Very Short Introduction

Some would argue that scarcely a day passes without a new assault on our privacy. In the wake of the whistle-blower Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of surveillance conducted by the security services in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, concerns about individual privacy have significantly increased. The Internet generates risks, unimagined even twenty years ago, to the security and integrity of information in all its forms.

The manner in which information is collected, stored, exchanged, and used has changed forever; and with it, the character of the threats to individual privacy. The scale of accessible private data generated by the phenomenal growth of blogs, social media, and other contrivances of our information age pose disturbing threats to our privacy. And the hunger for gossip continues to fuel sensationalist media that frequently degrade the notion of a private domain to which we reasonably lay claim.

In the new edition of this Very Short Introduction, Raymond Wacks looks at all aspects of privacy to include numerous recent changes, and considers how this fundamental value might be reconciled with competing interests such as security and freedom of expression.

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Raymond Wacks is a leading international authority on privacy. For almost four decades he has published numerous books and articles on the subject including The Protection of Privacy (Sweet & Maxwell, 1980); Personal Information: Privacy and the Law, (OUP, 1989); Privacy, a two-volume collection of essays (Dartmouth and New York University Press, 1993), Privacy and Press Freedom (Blackstone, 19950, and Privacy and Media Freedom (OUP, 2013). He has served on and advised privacy law reform commissions in a number of countries, and is a member of the editorial boards of several privacy-related journals and non-governmental organizations. He has also published numerous books and articles on various aspects of law, including Understanding Jurisprudence: An Introduction to Legal Theory 3rd edition (OUP, 2012), Philosophy of Law: A Very Short Introduction 2nd edition (OUP, 2014), and Law: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2008).