Private Life, Personal Secret or Personal Data: How to Interpret Information about the Person to the Law Enforcement Officer?

Relevance of the article is determined by considering the problem of interpreting the relationship between personal data and information about the private life of a person constituting his secret for the purpose of uniform law enforcement. Particular attention is paid to the position of the Constitutional and Supreme Courts of the Russian Federation, which have formed the practice of interpretation by courts of general jurisdiction of the concepts of private life and personal secrecy.

The purpose of the study is to supplement the theory of criminal law with new knowledge about the criteria for delimiting the terms under consideration, taking into account their difference and the qualification of crimes that encroach on the inviolability of privacy, personal secrets and personal data to effectively counter them.

Objectives: on the basis of the established positions of theorists and investigative and judicial practice, distinguish between the concepts under consideration and propose recommendations regarding a criminal law assessment of acts committed in relation to privacy and personal data.

Methodology. The research methodology is represented by general scientific and private scientific methods of knowing objective reality. Methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, as well as system-analytical, formallegal, formal-logical and documentary methods found their application in the work.

The results of the study are of a theoretical and applied nature and include the development of recommendations for the law enforcement officer regarding the assessment of the presence of evidence of corpus delicti that encroached on privacy, personal secrets or personal data. The specific examples show the formal interpretation of the extinguished or withdrawn criminal record as personal data in its legal absence. To ensure the balance of private and public interests, a different approach to understanding criminal records as a personal secret in the event of its repayment or removal is justified.

Conclusion. In law enforcement practice, there are no clear criteria for delineation, in which case private life, personal secrecy, and in which personal data are protected by means of criminal law. The proposal to introduce independent responsibility for illegal actions with personal data, which may not necessarily be information constituting privacy or personal secrets, is supported.

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