SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Peru held that the continuous use of surveillance technologies, by private corporations, entails a violation of privacy rights. The application was brought by a local environmental activist against a mining company for the use of surveillance cameras and drones that recorded and took pictures of her home. The Court stressed that the use of these devices was not unconstitutional per se, but only when they were employed in unreasonable or disproportionate manners. The Court held that the permanent use of the video camera and the possibility of constant overflight on the residence of the plaintiff constituted a constraint on her freedoms and privacy. In this decision the Court does not analyze the right to freedom of expression when considering the reasons for its ruling. Nonetheless, the scope of the protection of privacy in this particular case provides a protection of the right to freedom of expression against the chilling effect of surveillance or overly broad data collection. More info here. xii. Anonymity5 ECtHR: In the case of Standard Verlagsgesellschaft mbH v. Austria (No. 3) (2021), the Fourth Section of the ECtHR unanimously ruled that requiring the applicant to disclose personal information of its registered users violated the applicant’s freedom of expression. The applicant was a media company, publisher of the offline newspaper and its online version Der Standard. The case concerned online comments published by registered users on the applicant’s website against two right-wing Austrian politicians. The politicians and the political party requested the applicant to remove the comments and disclose the identities of the two authors to initiate civil and criminal procedures. The applicant deleted the comments but refused to provide the identity of the authors. On an application by the political leaders, the Supreme Court of Austria ordered the applicant to disclose personal data of the users. The Court found this to be a violation of the applicant’s Article 10 rights. By not taking into account the political nature of the contested comments and by not running any test on balancing competing interests, the domestic courts failed to protect the applicant’s right to freedom of expression. More info here. xiii. Publication of personal data by public agencies India: In the case of Saket v. Union of India (2020), the High Court of Bombay held that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting should not have uploaded the personal details of the applicant to its government website following his lodging of an information request under the Right to Information Act, 2005. In this case, the applicant’s personal data (including his name, home address, email address and telephone/mobile number) had been uploaded onto the Indian government website, which caused him immense trauma and public harassment. The Court found that the Ministry’s decision to upload his personal details was unnecessary and made the applicant 5 In the Case of Doe v. Harris (2014), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also analyzed how the protection of anonymity reinforces freedom of expression and privacy by granting the Plaintiffs a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of provisions which required anyone who is a registered sex offender to turn over a list of all their Internet identifiers and service providers to law enforcement. More here. 21