Equity, ‘Revenge Porn’, and Cambridge Analytica: The Doctrine of Confidence as a Protection for Human Dignity in the Technological Age

Breach of confidence is an equitable action that is increasingly significant for the protection of human dignity in the technological age. Its scope extends beyond the economic interests which more frequently invoke equity, to protecting dignity where an individual’s privacy interests have been violated. This paper considers the history of case development that consolidated the ability of confidence to protect dignity in its own right. It then looks at two contemporary contexts where new technologies necessitate the application of confidence to dignitary concerns: specifically, “revenge porn” cases where an individual abuses an intimate partner’s trust and privacy and in “data breach” situations where much larger entities release information of a data subject improperly. It is finally theorised that equity’s basis in conscience makes confidence well suited to protecting interests that are dignitary, rather than economic, in character. The contribution of this paper to the existing field of literature is to establish the growing utility of the doctrine of confidence as a private law action to deter and redress misuses of private information that are facilitated and amplified by technological advances.