Abstract
The right to privacy is one of the civil rights encompassed in almost every catalogue-styled international treaty protecting human rights. Recent revelations as well as decades-long development of information technologies and the internet have opened a topic mostly unknown before - the digital aspect of the right to privacy.
Some have argued that the right to privacy does not cover the digital sphere; others have claimed that even if it does, the ICCPR does not protect rights extraterritorially due to its wording. These claims have been shown to be incorrect.
Still though the protection of the right to privacy in the digital sphere presents a tough problem due to the nature of the digital world (the so-called cyber space) and the character of the system of human rights protection that was designed decades ago. The following article discusses some of the topics and presents opinions together with a proposed legal settlement.