Study Of The Legal Protection Of Network Privacy

Because of the vast development of internet technology, personal information collecting and leaking becomes more and more easy, which is a great challenge for privacy protection. The immature of our theory on online privacy limited the legislation process. Recently, there are two understanding of online privacy in academia, broad and narrow sense. The broad sense means natural person have the right to enjoy the peaceful personal life, the personal information should be protected by law, should not be infringed, known, collected, use or publish, including identifiable personal information and free networking activity. The narrow sense only includes the digital personal private information stored online. Online privacy includes the right to conceal, control, use and maintain.The subject, behavior, morphology, doctrine of liability fixation and reasons of impunity must be all taken into consideration to conclude online privacy infringement. The subject of online privacy infringement includes network user, network service provider, software/hardware provider and network administrator. The network users should divided into two major categories:personal user and business organization. Various infringement methods lead to material and emotional damage. There are two forms of online privacy infringement, separate tort and joint tort. Differs from network users, network service provider undertake responsibility only if the awareness of network users’infringement. Network service provider would not constitute a joint tort if it’s only a neglect of the network users’behavior. The excuse for nonresponsibility of online privacy includes some unique situations, in addition to deliberation of the infringed and fault of the third party. The online privacy of public figure is restricted by the right of free speech.In order to curb online privacy infringement, online privacy protection legislation is speeding up by the countries whose information technology is the most advanced. United States and the European Union have the most extensive influence than others among them. There are great differences between US and EU. US uses decentralized liberalism legislative mode. It’s very professional, the legislation process is short, and society response is very good. EU uses centralized legislative mode in order to protect personality rights. It’s very systematic, with good accommodation ability. In order to coordinate these two legislative modes to achieve international online privacy protection, the "safe harbor" framework is introduced. China’s online privacy protection legislation has processed in decades. Not only the direct privacy protection is achieved, also both private and public situation are taken into consideration. The personality rights and property rights are both considered. But, generally, the legislation is not systematic, and the main purpose of right protection is not very clear. In order to overcome these situations, we should develop a systematic online privacy protection law from sphere of application, principle of privacy information protection, the rights of the privacy and the liability for tort.This paper uses empirical analysis, comparative analysis, historical analysis, to reveal the theoretical and practical problems of online privacy from multiple point of view. Our own legislation advice is given.