Indonesia Conference Directory

At the present time, right to privacy or “the right to be let alone- as Warren and Brandeis described it is considered amongst established human rights that are introduced by the UDHR and then adopted by other instruments around the world. Though privacy described as “a right to control access to and uses of- places, bodies, and personal information” the concept of privacy and its scope are not concretely defined. The reason lies behind this could be the wide notion of privacy as it includes “separated but related concepts” such as bodily privacy; territorial privacy; privacy of communications and information privacy. In the Islamic perspective, the early Islamic jurists did not use terms such as ‘privacy right- or ‘right to be let alone-, but rights protected by modern privacy are also protected by Islamic law under various rulings such as prohibition of spy, rules of seeking permission for entering houses, covering awrah (the intimate parts of human body) and such like. According to this, right to privacy is recognized and protected by well-known established rules in the Islamic Fiqh (law), as well as in the Islamic culture and traditions. This paper argues that Islamic rules relating to privacy, if adopted, could protect privacy in the digital era and fill the gap that modern secular privacy law is unable to fill.