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Hielke Hijmans, Lee A. Bygrave, Data Privacy Law, an International Perspective, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, 272 pages, 234 × 156 mm, £75, ISBN 978-0-19-967555-5, International Data Privacy Law, Volume 5, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 88–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipu031
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Addressing data privacy law from an international perspective is challenging as this book by Lee Bygrave shows. Bygrave has managed to write a book which is densely written and has a rich content. It will definitely be of much use for practitioners, officials, and academics dealing with the many international dimensions of data privacy, or data protection as it is called in Europe.1 Those international dimensions are inherent to this field of law, due to the global nature of internet and even more in an evolving era of big data, but, as follows from my introductory sentence, they are quite complicated.
The first complication is the terminology. As Bygrave explains in Chapter 1, data privacy is not the same as data security, but it is also not the same as privacy, since according to him, in some respects, data privacy encompasses more than privacy. This statement sounds familiar for Europeans, dealing with data protection within the Council of Europe and the European Union (EU) and now recognized in Article 8 of the Charter of the Fundamental Rights of the Union as a fundamental right, separate from the right to privacy but closely connected to it.2 Already in the European context, the difference between the two rights is not obvious as is evidenced by the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the EU that does not make a systematic distinction between privacy and data protection.3 However, in contexts where data privacy is used it is even less obvious to conclude that data privacy may be wider than ‘ordinary’ privacy.
