The 32nd International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners Conference - Privacy: Generations 2010

For hundreds of generations, privacy has been recognized as a fundamental human right in Israel. It was mentioned in the Bible in the phrase How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel (Numbers 24:5), interpreted to mean that the tents of the Israelites faced away from each other in order to ensure the privacy of their dwellers. It was elevated to constitutional status in modern Israel in Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.

Today, privacy stands at a crossroads. The existing legal and regulatory frameworks, in the EU, US, and OECD, as well as in Israel, date back to the 1980s and 1990s. They predate a
new generation of technologies including mobile devices, biometrics, RFID, cloud
computing, indeed, the Internet itself which has swept through the marketplace with such force so as to destabilize laws and regulations. They have seen shifts in the perception of privacy among a new generation of users, who post personal information and communicate with friends and colleagues on social networks. Policymakers all over the world realize that this sea change calls for a new generation of governance.