Academics across the world, especially in the United States, have dedicated vast amounts of time and energy to studying privacy, etching out detailed theories of privacy, scrutinising it from a variety of perspectives, and weaving through disciplines, past, present and future trends, concerns and problems associated with the concept. British scholars, on the other hand, have traditionally taken a more doctrinal approach to the subject. Yet we can take those carefully crafted theoretical lenses, and peer through them to examine the right to privacy located in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Moreover, by doing so we can also examine the quality and suitability of these theoretical lenses against the backdrop of non-American privacy jurisprudence.
This book seeks to do this by analysing the following dimensions of privacy: scope, desirability, vulnerability, states, value, balance and remedy. The fruits of this analysis offer the first thematic account of the privacy protection afforded by Article 8 ECHR, and an external view on privacy theory.