Publications

Wisdom, Understanding and Data.  ​

Acclaimed by President Emeritus of the Israeli Supreme Court, Professor Aaron Barak, as "fascinating and profound", this is a unique Hebrew-language monograph on privacy and biblical scholarship. Each chapter highlights an interpretive difficulty from a weekly Torah reading, and elucidates it based on insights from the field of data privacy. Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, KC, wrote: "Arye Schreiber's innovative, thought-provoking but accessible book brings together the weekly parasha and contemporaneous legal and related issues.... the deceptively short essays cover large and important topics. Arye's sources are broad, his learning is deep and his insight is sharp - and the combination is both fascinating and original." The book is available for purchase here. 

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Feeling Fine!  Harmonisation and inconsistency in EU supervisory authority administrative fines. ​

One of the main goals of GDPR was harmonisation of penalties across EU member states. However, GDPR itself as well as member state laws introduced numerous inconsistencies and complexities to the application of administrative fines under GDPR. This article identifies several areas of inconsistency and explores their roots. Read it here (pdf). 

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Privacy and the Holocaust

Addressing some of the key data protection challenges to Holocaust research, this article presents several creative ways to overcome those challenges, particularly with reference to GDPR, and ensure that Holocaust research continues. Read it here (pdf) or here (online). 

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Right to be Forgotten v The Duty to Remember

This article contends with the persistent abuse of privacy and data protection law in response to human rights abuses, particularly the Holocaust. Research organizations, banks, insurers, governments and courts. Some strategies for managing human rights abuse research post-GDPR are explored, and important conclusions presented. Download it here. 

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Cloud-enabled technologies and privacy paradigms

Cloud technologies threaten privacy as a part of one's sense of self, rather than control per se. Existing privacy torts do not adequately address new forms of injury. Two examples analysed: Data surveillance causes real injury even to a person who is not actually the target of the dataveillance, but that injury is not protected; also, information manipulation is becoming increasingly prevalent and is a real but at present inactionable form of harm. In addition, the horizontal–vertical divide is deeply affected by cloud-enabled technologies. Privacy law in these two areas has distinct laws and treatment, but the lines between them are fast breaking down. 

To read the full article click here.

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Privacy and Wearable Computing

This article was published in Oxford's International Data Privacy Law journal 2014, and analyses the impact that wearable computing (such as Glass, smartwatches etc) will have on privacy law and practice.

The article was one of the first to address in depth Tech Wearables and their impact on privacy.  

To read the full article click here.

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Privacy and Family-based Rights

Published in International Family Law, Policy and Practice (2014), this article explores the familistic characteristics of privacy in Israeli law. This includes both decisional privacy – the right to make one’s own major decisions as to life and lifestyle, and informational privacy - control of personal data, at least as between spouses. Even as other jurisdictions have largely individualized privacy rights of spouses, Israeli law continues to treat privacy as extending to the family as an entity. The article extends its findings and investigation to several  emerging areas of law, including: rights to fertilized ova, organ donation, privacy rights of the dead, forensic use of familial DNA, and 'honor killings'.

To read the full article click here.

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Privacy: Proprietary or Human right?

This article, published in the 2009 Intellectual Property Quarterly, examines legislative provisions and case​-law to explore whether Israeli law treats privacy as proprietary or as a human right. The article concluds that the Privacy Law - 1981 originally conceived of privacy as a presonal, human right. However, case-law introduced proprietary aspects to privacy, for example: rights in the deceased, and even in corporations; injunctive relief and various defenses were applied as if it were a proprietary right and so on. Amendments to the law have also given the right a distinctly proprietary charachter. The Israeli law of privacy is thus in a confused and misshapen state.

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Confidence crisis: why invasion of privacy should be independently recognised in English Law​

This 2006 article in the Intellectual Property Quarterly presents seven arguments as to why English law should recognize, or recognise, a tort of 'Invasion of Privacy'. These are:

1. Breach of confidence is jurisprudentially inappropriate to protect privacy.

2. Privacy is quasi-constitutional, whereas confidence is normal common law.
3. Applying confidence to protect privacy distorts the confidence action.
4. Confidence is best applied to commercial information, and privacy is best suited to personal information.
5. Confidence may be inadequate in protecting privacy at common law.
6. Confidence is inadequate to protect privacy under ECHR and HRA.
7. For socio-educational reasons privacy should be independently protected.

 

This article has been quoted extensively, for example in Gurry on Confidence (OUP 2012); Intellectual Property and Human Rights (Kluwer 2008); Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2009); Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal (2007); it has also been required reading in law schools. 

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Privacy and Crowdsourcing

Published in 2013 Data Protection Law & Policy (Volume 10, Issue 10), this article discusses both the challenges to privacy presented by crowdsourcing, and the solutions that corwdsouring brings to existing privacy concerns.

Crowdsourcing creates particular risks for privacy, but also provides some novel and effective enhancements for privacy. Crowdsourcing apps generally create fairly rich data about their users, even when ostensibly anonymous data is provided. In addition, some novel crowdsourcing technologies record very specific data about our faces, emotions, location and much more which quite apart from their potential for abuse create a fairly sinister feeling of being observed in a most intimate way. Finally, some crowdsourcing technologies have citizens collaborate with police in a way, which though all in a good cause, creates considerable privacy risk. Conversely, crowdsourcing is starting to provide some highly novel, exciting and effective ways to protect privacy. Our devices and apps can learn, and then meet, our privacy expectations and demands. We can be alerted when our use of crowdsourcing sites and other apps is inconsistent with our privacy aspirations, and in that way too crowdsourcing can limit the privacy risk associated with crowdsourcing.