Keeping secrets in the age of tweets

Keeping secrets in the age of tweets

Britain’s privacy law is a mess—and increasingly unsustainable

TAKE the common-law principles of fairness, add a dash of European human-rights legislation, a lucrative tabloid trade in kiss-and-tell stories, an ineffective press watchdog, a touch of angst about secret justice and a technology that makes everyone into a publisher, and what do you get? The mess of Britain’s privacy laws, now under sweeping review by a joint committee of both houses of Parliament.