The rules that govern what is recorded about a person, what is disclosed, and what may be done about it are not a fixed background. They are law and policy, and law and policy change. Anyone taking a long view of their privacy has to reckon with the fact that the legal landscape on which their position rests will not be the same landscape in ten years that it is today.

The change runs in both directions, which is what makes it hard to plan around. In some respects the protections available to individuals have strengthened: there are rights to ask what is held, to seek correction, sometimes to seek removal. In other respects disclosure has widened: registers once closed have been opened, transparency has been extended, more is required to be filed and made public. The direction is not single. It is a shifting balance.

It also varies by place. Privacy law is national, or regional, and jurisdictions differ from one another considerably and move at different speeds. A person whose affairs touch more than one jurisdiction, as the affairs of people of standing usually do, is therefore exposed to several shifting landscapes at once, each with its own direction of travel.

The mistake this invites is to build a position that depends too precisely on the present rules. An arrangement that works because a particular register is currently closed, or because a particular protection currently exists, is an arrangement with a hidden dependency. If the rule it relies on moves, the arrangement moves with it, and not necessarily in the owner's favour.

The better instinct is to build for resilience rather than for the present state of the law. A position that does not depend too heavily on any single rule, that is sound across a range of plausible changes rather than tuned to the current one, is a position that will weather the shifting. This is a matter of design, and it is best done with the changeability of law treated as a known feature rather than an unwelcome surprise.

The foresight, in short, is to hold the legal landscape lightly. The rules are part of the picture and must be understood, but they are the part most certain to change. A privacy position worth having is one built in the knowledge that the law beneath it will move, and built so that, when it does, the position still stands.