Privacy Vs Democracy: The Challenge for Japan and Australia

Protecting privacy is as critical as information sharing. In a democracy, protecting information goes hand-in-hand with ensuring individual liberty, and the rapid development of digital technology has made the protection of privacy even more important.  One key challenge for democratic governance is formulating policies to ensure information privacy protection.  In contrast to the United States and Western Europe, where privacy regulation started in the early 1970s, privacy regulation began to develop in Japan and Australia only in the 1980s, but each country has slowly developed comprehensive privacy regulation since then.  Japan scholar and Minnesota State University professor Eiji Kawabata will examine the development of privacy policy in Japan and Australia, and assess policies that would be effective in balancing privacy protection and ensuring national security.