Privacy in Public Space ─ Conceptual and Regulatory Challenges

With ongoing technological innovations such as mobile cameras, WiFi tracking, drones, and augmented reality, aspects of citizens’ lives are becoming increasingly vulnerable to intrusion. This book brings together authors from a variety of disciplines (philosophy, law, political science, economics, and media studies) to examine privacy in public space from both legal and regulatory perspectives. The contributors explore the contemporary challenges to achieving privacy and anonymity in physical public space at a time when legal protection remains limited in comparison to ‘private’ space. To address this problem, the book clearly demonstrates why privacy in public space needs defending. Different ways of conceptualizing and shaping such protection are explored, for example through ‘privacy bubbles’, obfuscation and surveillance transparency, as well as by revising the assumptions underlying current privacy laws.Scholars and students who teach and study issues of privacy, autonomy, technology, urban geography and the law and politics of public spaces will be interested in this book.

Edited by Tjerk Timan, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT), Tilburg University, the Netherlands, Bryce Clayton Newell, School of Information Science, University of Kentucky, US and Bert-Jaap Koops, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT), Tilburg University, the Netherlands