사이버공간상 프라이버시 개념의 변화와 그에 대한 법적 대응방안

Traditionally, the concept of the right to privacy has been discussed under several different subtitles: namely, the right to be let alone, limited access to the self, secrecy, control of personal information, personhood and intimacy. However, since the inception of the concept of “privacy”, it has become to embrace so many concepts that the usage of the word “privacy” is now almost limitless. That is especially true when the courts and legal scholars acknowledge that the right to privacy means control over information concerning his or her person. The control-over-information aspect of privacy in the U.S. can be referred to as the right to informational self-determination in Germany and Korea. Even though both the rights of privacy to control over information and informational self-determination have constitutional dimensions, the property or even intellectual property rights of privacy or information has become more and more important. The reason behind this change is that social networking services, or SNS, such as Facebook, MySpace and Xing are gaining great importance around the world. In this article, we discuss that SNS have distinctive characteristics in terms of privacy compared to other activities in cyberspace. All users of SNS voluntarily upload information about themselves and they can’t claim the protection of privacy to that information. Users of SNS regularly disclose the information of other individuals in the name of ‘friends’ without obtaining the consent of those individuals. We argue in this article that in those situations the users and other individuals should have rights to control over the information about him or herself. The rights to control over the information could not only be the constitutional rights, but also property and or contractual rights. By doing this, we can protect human dignity associated with the information of the self, we can also promote the efficiency of the transactions of information in cyberspace, including SNS.