The right to privacy A challenge for judicial and political balancing

Tracing apps that track our contacts with other people to prevent the spread of a deadly virus; algorithms that scan our online communication to detect and prevent threats of online child sexual abuse; public registers containing information on the beneficial ownership of companies to combat money laundering and tax evasion: the right to privacy often clashes with other rights or interests, making it necessary to balance privacy and these competing considerations. The question is: how do we find the right balance? The thesis The Right to Privacy: A Challenge for Judicial and Political Balancing develops a framework to address recurring conflicts between the right to privacy and other rights or interests by means of balancing. It rejects a reductionist approach to balancing, which can be derived from a pervasive economic view on privacy. This reductionist approach fails to adequately reflect two important features of privacy, namely the status of the right to privacy as a basic right and the variability of privacy conceptions. Instead, the thesis develops a framework which builds on an interplay between two perspectives, that of courts and of legislatures, and which seeks to address the tension between having to determine what is covered by the right to privacy and the many different, competing conceptions of privacy.