Jessica Lake

I began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men were using defamation law to inflict further abuse and punishment on their victims, to cow them into silence, to chill public discussion of sexual violence – seemed apt indeed.

Privacy crises come in waves, usually spurred by public panics over new technologies and their exploitation by those in power. In the 1890s, it was the evils of ‘instantaneous photography and newspaper enterprise’ that pushed Harvard jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to famously advocate for a new common law (‘judge made’) right to privacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the availability of the contraceptive pill set the stage for the US Supreme Court’s declaration of a constitutional right to privacy in the (now threatened) decision of Griswold v Connecticut (1965). Similarly, fears about ‘King Kong’-sized government data centres ultimately led to the passing of the US Privacy Act 1974. In her latest book, The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, paints a vivid and compelling picture of privacy now under siege by online invaders. She argues convincingly for a new US civil right to ‘intimate privacy’, and sets out a precise and practical path towards achieving it.

Privacy is having its moment. Google users have unknowingly permitted the corporation to track their every movement and record every web search, YouTube video watched, and more. Facebook allowed data to be collected from users and their friends via a third-party application, which were then used by data analytics firm ...