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Thread: Taking a Stand To Protect Privacy* Europeans question the morality of digital companies.

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[quote=MARRIE,457503]"Europe has come to the conclusion that none of the companies can be trusted," said Simon Davies, the director of the London-based nonprofit Privacy International. "There is a growing mood of despondency about the privacy issue."

Every European country has a privacy law, as do Canada, Australia and many Latin American countries. The United States remains a holdout. It has separate laws that protect health records and financial information, and even one that keeps private what movies people rent. But there is no law that spells out the control and use of online data.

It would be tempting to say that history and culture on this side of the Atlantic make privacy a non-issue. That's not exactly the case. Privacy has always mattered in American law and to American sensibilities, but in a different way.

Anxieties over privacy came up when postcards were first sent in the late 19th century. The advent of photography
prompted Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, in an 1890 article in The Harvard Law Review, to warn of the dangers of displaying private family wedding pictures in the pages of every newspaper.

And in one of the most important privacy decisions in recent years, the Supreme Court in January ruled that police officers violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect's car, to monitor its movements.

"Europeans are much more sensitive about controlling their image online," said James Q. Whitman, a Yale Law School professor who has written about the differences in jurisprudence between the United States and Europe.

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