The war on Internet privacy: a study of the European data protection legislation and the European public debate regarding privacy on the Internet

Sammanfattning: The high amount of information circulating on the Internet and the consequent possibility to monitor this information has sparked a discussion regarding privacy on the Internet. In early 2012, the EU responded to this by presenting a major reform of its data protection legislation. It is the possible source of this reform that has been of interest in this study. With a discourse analysis guided by a combination of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and a sociological theory of lawmaking, the possible existence of a connection between the European public debate regarding Internet privacy rights and the EU’s proposed data protection legislation reform has been examined. The data gathered from EU documents, one British newspaper and one Swedish newspaper suggests that the EU’s proposed reform has been influenced by public opinion. There are also indications that the public opinion has changed somewhat during the period after the EU presented the proposed reform, calling into question how effective the proposed reform will be and whether or not legislation can have a reversed effect on the public debate.