ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the rights which cut across ownership rights, or even run completely counter to them: rights to access or control data accumulated by others. Starting with the right to see one's opponent's data in hostile litigation, it proceeds to personal privacy law generally, and then to the specific safeguards for personal data in the data protection legislation. Data protection law, inspired by the growth of computing power available to government and business in the 1970s, can be traced to a Council of Europe Convention of 1981, which led the UK to enact legislation in 1984 and Ireland to do the same in 1988. The UK legislation covers all public and private systems. However, it provides that the controller of a private system commits no offence by intercepting communications on its own system. The chapter also focuses on the use of customer and other data in e-commerce, especially where the data is collected or used on a web site.
