The structure of rights in Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data

The paper has three parts. First, a survey and analysis is given of the structure of individual rights in the recent EU Directive on data protection. It is argued that at the core of this structure is an unexplicated notion of what the data subject can 'reasonably expect' concerning the further processing of information about him or herself. In the second part of the paper it is argued that theories of privacy popular among philosophers are not able to shed much light on the issues treated in the Directive, which are, arguably, among the central problems pertaining to the protection of individual rights in the information society. In the third part of the paper, some suggestions are made for a richer philosophical theory of data protection and privacy. It is argued that this account is better suited to the task of characterizing the central issues raised by the Directive. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.