Ethical evaluation of legal privacy protection through the GDPR and the e-Privacy Directive

This bachelor thesis is devoted to an ethical evaluation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the e-Privacy Directive. The thesis is structured into theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part deals with the issue of personal data, with an emphasis on the risks and threats associated with the careless handling of private data. After a legal analysis of the two legislative texts, an ethical assessment was made based on the ideas of Helen Nissenbaum and Daniel J. Solove. Furthermore, the thesis highlights the importance of the role of the individual himself as a data subject, to whom the responsibility of protecting and selecting the personal data to be shared is often delegated. While both the GDPR and the e-Privacy Directive provide an effective protection framework for data subjects, it is the human factor that is the key. It is therefore important that such an individual is both adequately informed and educated in the area, so that they can effectively counter potential threats. The practical part focuses on exploring awareness and ethical attitudes towards GDPR and the e-Privacy Directive among ordinary internet users. The results show a certain paradox between the perceived importance of privacy protection and actual behaviour, with users often agreeing to the processing of their data without reading the terms and conditions. The results further suggest that although the GDPR as a whole is perceived to be in line with ethical principles, its profiling sub-part is not perceived as such. Furthermore, the research provides important information to confirm some of the conclusions of the ethical evaluation and offers insights into how users understand and evaluate these regulations from an ethical perspective. In the ethical assessment, the author concludes that although both regulations are not fully ethical in the area of transparency of the presentation of the conditions of processing of personal data, it would be difficult to find a legal solution that would not restrict the freedoms of either of the parties involved. It was also found that not everything can be legally regulated for various reasons, some situations have to be communicated between people. The author correctly estimated that the most common way of not reading the terms and conditions of personal data processing among the respondents is the length and time it takes to read them.