Beyond accountability, the return to privacy?

Faced to the inability of existing legislations to efficiently protect individuals against new practices such as profiling or data mining, a focus upon and a reinforcement of the accountability principle have been proposed. This paper however, aims at going beyond the accountability principle by questioning the rationale of the existing legal framework.
Too often the legal protection of privacy is solely envisaged from the perspective of data protection. This is symptomatic of the assumption that data protection is a full translation of "informational privacy". However, this overlooks the fact that privacy and data protection obey to two fundamentally different logics, respectively a prohibitionary or "opacity" logic, and a regulatory or "transparency" logic. Therefore, equating privacy and data protection is not without dangers, since this position fails to deal with infringements upon privacy that are not linked to the processing of personal data.
This paper therefore contends that the principle of accountability will always fall short of effectively protecting the privacy of individuals if it remains limited to improving the implementation of data protection legislation.