Recent developments in governmental surveillance have increased the significance of protecting associational privacy. While it has been argued that Article 21 of the Constitution ensures associational privacy, it remains to be seen to what extent this privacy is protected. With reference to the relevant arguments in United States constitutional law, this paper assumes that associational privacy is protected under Article 21 within the range necessary to exclude unreasonable public impediment to the formation and decision-making of associations. In this context, compulsory disclosure of association member lists is prohibited unless there is any legitimate reason. On the contrary, collection and analysis of information on associations that is easily accessible on the Internet is not prohibited as they do not, by themselves, necessarily preclude associational activities even though they can be a threat to privacy of the associations. Such threat can be defensible based on the rights not to be intruded into private spheres under Article 35 of the Constitution, given that associations themselves have their own private spheres while they presumably have no rights to freely control their own self-information. Therefore, it is fair to argue that associational privacy is protected both by Article 21 and by Article 35 in a complementary manner.

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Today, increasing children’s use of smart phones and the development of ‘smart toys’ has led to an increase in various risks to children’s personal data. The data subject’s consent plays an important role in protecting personal data under the current data protection law. However, children’s ability to consent to the processing of their personal data is generally considered to be insufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to consider how to obtain the consent to the processing of children’s personal data. US COPPA and EU GDPR set the age threshold from which children are treated as legally competent to consent and require parental consent with respect to children under that age. It is necessary for Japan to examine the appropriate age threshold from a normative perspective. Moreover, the appropriate mechanisms for age verification and obtaining parental consent should be examined from a practical perspective.

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