The right to disappear: What Israel can learn from Europe about privacy - opinion

I happened to be in the city shortly afterward. By then, the two had been found. I was not searching for them. Instead, I looked at the environment they had moved through.

What struck me was the ubiquity of surveillance. At Vienna’s main railway station alone, dozens of security cameras were plainly visible. Cameras were also visible in shops and public spaces. Like virtually every major European capital, Vienna is a city in which movement through transportation hubs leaves digital traces.

That made me reconsider the Israeli reaction.

Walking through Vienna, however, I began to wonder whether this was the wrong question. Perhaps the more interesting issue was not what a modern state can discover but what a liberal democracy is entitled to do with information about adults who may be acting voluntarily.

Important limits remain to what can be said about this investigation, and parts of the case remain subject to legal restrictions. It would be wrong to speculate about what the Austrian police knew, when they knew it, or which tools they used. Public reporting suggests circumstances more complicated than a simple case of two people seeking privacy. The case should not be forced into a neat philosophical parable.

But the questions it raises remain.

For many Israelis, the assumption was straightforward. A mother and daughter had vanished. Their relatives were terrified.

The two had failed to return home as expected. Surely the police should find them and say where they were.

There is something recognizably Israeli in that assumption.

Israel’s security culture reinforces that instinct. Israelis routinely accept intrusions into privacy in the name of safety that many Europeans might find uncomfortable. We open our bags at entrances, answer questions at airports, and encounter security checks in everyday life. In an emergency, we expect the state to use the tools at its disposal. When someone goes missing, our instinct is simple: find them.

European law and political culture often act from a different premise.

Privacy and data protection occupy an unusually prominent place in European law and political culture. European political systems remain deeply conscious of the dangers created when governments possess extensive information about individuals with too few restraints on how it can be used.

The distinction matters. A city can possess extensive surveillance capabilities without assuming that the resulting information belongs to relatives, the press, or the public. The ability to determine where someone is does not automatically entitle others to know.

The question becomes particularly uncomfortable when an adult disappears voluntarily.

If someone has been kidnapped, attacked, or coerced, the responsibility to intervene is clear. But what if an adult chooses to leave and does not want to be found? Does her family have a right to know where she is? Does the public? Does the press? At what point does the obligation to search end and personal autonomy begin?

Such questions can sound almost offensive in an Israeli context when frightened relatives are involved. Our instinct is that their anguish should outweigh almost every competing consideration.

If the police have information, tell them. If technology can locate someone, use it. The idea that an adult might possess something approaching a right to disappear can clash with a culture built around unusually strong bonds of family and collective responsibility.

Yet on one crucial point, I think the European instinct is correct.

An adult who is competent, safe, and acting freely does not lose her privacy because those who love her desperately want information. Even the strongest bonds do not give us an unconditional claim to another adult’s whereabouts or reasons for leaving. In this sense, the right to disappear is not the right to obstruct a lawful investigation; it is the right to go against the notion of automatic disclosure.

But privacy should not require cruelty.

Once police establish that a missing adult is alive, safe, and acting voluntarily, there is a strong case for telling loved ones precisely that, so long as doing so creates no further safety risk. Police need not reveal the person’s location or other information she wishes to keep private. The family deserves reassurance, not necessarily disclosure.

That distinction offers a way to reconcile two values that need not be absolute rivals: the understandable need to know that someone we love is safe and the individual’s claim to autonomy.

None of this means that Europeans care less about family or that Israelis care nothing about privacy. The difference emerges when legitimate values collide.

Israel gives exceptional weight to family solidarity and collective responsibility, reinforced by a security culture in which protecting life can justify intrusions into personal autonomy. European institutions and political culture often give greater formal weight to privacy, individual choice, and restraints on state power.

This is what stayed with me as I walked through Vienna. Israelis had looked at the disappearance primarily as a practical problem: Where are they, and why have the police not found them? I began to see a harder question beneath it: How much are we entitled to know about an adult who does not want to be found?

Israelis and Europeans frequently speak of their shared democratic values. But sharing values does not mean ranking them in the same order. Both value security, privacy, family, freedom, and human dignity. Their differences emerge most clearly when those values collide.

Here, I believe the balance should be clear. The state should establish that a missing adult is safe. The family deserves to know that much.