DOES UKRAINE NEED A COMPREHENSIVE STATUTE TO 'CONTROL' PRIVATE DATA CONTROLLERS?

I. Introduction Western civilization altered social interactions in the twentieth century simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, humankind developed sophisticated technology for collecting, compiling, analyzing, and sharing information about people. On the other hand, people increasingly grew to respect human individuality and independent mental experimentation, which inevitably led to shared acknowledgement of a right to be left alone. Technological advances triggered public concern about individual privacy and demanded that legal systems respond by creating means to protect personal data, information related to identified or identifiable individuals. 1 Not only national legal systems, but also the global international community, reacted to the new challenge by adopting relevant legal instruments. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2 and the 1950 Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) recognized privacy as a fundamental human right. 3 In the 1960s, the right to privacy began to be given explicit protection in the United States, through the Supreme Court's decisions in Mapp v. Ohio 4 and Griswold v. Connecticut. 5 In 1980, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the world's thirty largest economies signing on as members, adopted the Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data. 6 The Guidelines' objective is to reconcile the fundamental but competing values such as privacy and the free flow of information. 7 The following year, the Council of Europe followed suit by enacting the Convention for ...