Privacy At Home

One of the central themes in the FreedomBox project is hosting services in one's home to benefit from additional legal protections for privacy that may not apply to similar services in the cloud.

More than the simple benefit of "hosting one's own services" these legal protections may provide a substantially better level of privacy often by requiring additional steps for third parties to access the data.

Cloud based services are not necessarily or categorically "anti-privacy", but their legal obligations are often different than those for individuals. For example we have seen a recent set of "voluntary" actions by companies in both the EU and US jurisdictions are undermining constitutional and legal freedoms. Examples include:

This page is not intended as legal advice nor attempts to be a comprehensive reference for interpretation of law in the myriad of global jurisdictions. The purpose of this page is to collect pointers to laws, legal opinions, and other references which elucidate the special case of privacy at home.

USA

from Wikipedia:

Europe

The European analogy of the 4th amendment is spread out over several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). For example article 6, which is about due process, and article 8 which is about privacy could be argued as analogs to the 4th amendment.

from Wikipedia:

Note that article 15 warrants secrecy of correspondence and all communication and requires an order by a court having jurisdiction to remove that secrecy.

Strictly speaking, the EU has at least the same protections as the US 4th amendment, in particular via Council of Europe Recommendation R(87)15 and the EU Framework Decision.

Also it is important to consider the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

France

The French civil code (article 9) provides that "everyone has the right to respect for his or her private life". Only a judge can interfer with "the intimacy of private life."

France has no privacy provisions in its constitution. The preamble of the constitution recalls the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Declaration provides in its article 4 the following : "Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law."

Germany

Germany has privacy provisions in its constitution (articles 10 and 13).

Italy

Italy has privacy provisions in its constitution.

Poland

The following are basics of the Polish Criminal Proceedings (all the rules established by the the European Convention on Human Rights and the Court also apply):

The search and seizure can be performed only by a prosecutor or the police (in general, the police have to have a court's order). A search should be conducted with moderation and with observance of dignity of persons who are subject to search, and without causing unnecessary damage and ailment (Article 227 of the Polish Code of Criminal Proceedings - CCP). A person who is subject to search must be notified of the search before and must be asked to disclose all items that are sought. The police should present the order of the court or prosecutor (Article 220 § 3 of the CCP). In urgent cases, if the decision of the court or the prosecutor has not been issued yet, the police officer making the search has to show his ID and/or the order issued by his superior, and then he has to return immediately to the court or prosecutor to approve such a search.

Such search approval decision of the court or prosecutor shall be served to the person who has been searched, within 7 days from the search. If, within 7 days from the date of the search there are no court's approval, all seized things shall be returned immediately to the person entitled, unless they were given voluntarily and that person has not requested return of these things. The rightful owner should have immediately returned things that are not needed for criminal proceedings (Article 230 § 1 and 2 CPC).

Slovenia

A similar provision can be found in § 37 of the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia. Other important articles include §§ 38,29.

Please find the official English translation of the articles in question quoted below:

Spain

Spain has privacy provisions in its constitution (article 18).

According to technical support from spanish internet provider movistar.es on October 22th 2015, FreedomBox can be used at home without any particular restriction. For further information about personal server and legislation in Spain, it is advised to talk to the following local associations : Asociación de Usuarios de Internet (AUI) Asociación de Internautas


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