Reasonable Expectations of Privacy With Special Regard to European Privacy and Data Protection Law

‘Reasonable expectations of privacy’ have become a cornerstone concept in privacy and data protection legislation worldwide, extending today from US constitutional law to the GDPR, Article 8 ECHR, and various Asian and African data protection frameworks. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of this complex and ambiguous legal concept, addressing the many questions regarding its proper function, interpretation and application. Tracing the notion's evolution from the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in ‘Katz v United States’ to its status as a widespread paradigm of global privacy discourse, the work illuminates the many fallacies that pervade both academic and judicial interpretations. At its core, the book explores and evaluates four distinct models of ‘reasonable expectations,’ analysing their normative foundations and practical implications in depth. In doing so, the book also contributes to broader discussions within privacy and data protection theory, as it identifies and evaluates different strategies for regulating privacy conflicts, such as interest balancing or social norms-based regulation. Finally, the book also makes significant contributions to the scholarship on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Article 8 ECHR, evaluating how 'reasonable expectations' operate within these contexts from empiric and normative perspectives.

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I. Reasonable Expectations of Privacy. History and General Characteristics.- Chapter 2. A Short History of Reasonable Expectations of Privacy.- Chapter 3. General characteristics: “reasonable expectations” as a “reasonable person” doctrine.- Chapter 4. Epistemological and methodological preliminaries.- Chapter 4. Epistemological and methodological preliminaries.- Part II. Models of Reasonable Expectations of Privacy.- Chapter 5. The cognitive model.- Chapter 6. The normative model.- Chapter 7. The hybrid model.- Chapter 8. The hybrid model.- Chapter 9. Conclusion to Part II.-  Part III. Reasonable Expectations in European Data Privacy Law.- Chapter 10. Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights.- Chapter 11. The General Data Protection Regulation.- Chapter 12. Conclusions to Part III.- Part IV. Conclusion.- Chapter 13. Summary of findings.- Chapter 14. Conclusion and outlook.- Primary sources.

Dr. Paul Friedl is a legal scholar specializing in data and technology law. Following his PhD in law from Humboldt University Berlin, Paul worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and is currently an affiliate researcher at New York University's Information Law Institute. Paul’s research examines how law shapes the governance of data, technology and the internet, with a particular focus on the regulation of artificial intelligence. He has also written on other issues of (European) public law, particularly in the area of fundamental rights.