A Digital Space of One’s Own: Rethinking Children’s Online Privacy

Abstract

Abstract This paper rereads the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, as it was adopted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Jones v Tsige, to include a fuller account of online privacy. It proposes that the Court’s stress on informational privacy forfeits a more dynamic and “spatialized” conception of privacy harm. This paper develops a relational account of spatial privacy using the work of Iris Marion Young, Virginia Woolf, and Jennifer Nedelsky based on three features—embodied habits, narrative, and experimentation—to supplement the informational reading of privacy in Jones. While Jones is not a case about young people, this paper nonetheless takes the Court’s emphasis on digital technology as an invitation to reflect on young people’s privacy. Using different accounts of young people’s online experience, it proposes that while privacy is certainly transformed by the online world, its basic spatial features have not changed as dramatically as the Court in Jones suggests.