Is privacy a human right? An empirical examination in a global context

Privacy has become an emergent concern in today's digital society. Although scholars have defined privacy from different perspectives, it is still a complex and ambiguous concept. The absence of a concrete concept of privacy impedes the development of privacy legislation and policies in a global context. Therefore, a cross-cultural/national understanding of privacy is urgently needed for establishing a global privacy protocol. This empirical study seeks to better understand privacy by exploring public beliefs of privacy in a global context and further investigating socio-cultural influences on these beliefs. First, we explored general global public beliefs of privacy and then analyzed associations among privacy beliefs and socio-cultural factors. We also investigated the important issue of whether the general global public sees privacy as a “human right.” Results show that most participants agreed with concepts of privacy as a right. However, people had more diverse views on privacy as a right not to be annoyed and social norm privacy concepts. Importantly, nearly eighty percent of people believed in privacy as a human right and nearly seventy percent disagreed with privacy as a concern only for those having something to hide. In the era of globalization, our study provides a bottom-up understanding of privacy beliefs that we believe is essential for the development of global privacy regulation and policies.