Who Killed Privacy?

Abstract:     
It is more than a decade since the former chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems infamously declared that privacy was dead, urging the reporters who had asked him about the subject to 'get over it'. That was before the launch of Facebook, Google’s Street View, the iPhone, and a proliferation of other tools that many saw as driving nails into privacy’s coffin. As Singapore prepares to adopt a new Personal Data Protection Act, it is telling that the word 'privacy' does not appear once in the draft legislation. This might be dismissed as a typically wary approach to rights by the Government, but Europe is also reviewing its data protection regime in a way that renders privacy a marginal rather than central concern. So who killed privacy?

Keywords: privacy, data protection, Singapore

Accepted Paper Series