The emergence of whistleblowers has become one of the most relevant phenomena in the modern world, mostly due to the polarizing views of different audiences on data protection and the right to privacy. The debate about the connection between these terms is undeniably in the gray area and has been going on since the birth of the Internet until today. When the world's most famous whistleblower and former employee of the American National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, exposed in 2013 the secret programs by which the American government carried out mass surveillance of the American population and other countries and political leaders, his case became a direct symptom of deep ideological and sociopolitical problems of contemporary civilization that are connected with the limitation of basic human freedoms and the right to privacy, about which the discourse was already started earlier in philosophy (M. Foucault and J. Bentham) and literature (G. Orwell). Snowden's case took on international proportions and, among other things, started a discussion about the future role of investigative journalism in the digital age. This overview master's thesis aims to point out the connection between the importance and the right to freedom and the protection of data and information and the development of democracy and human rights, as well as to problematize the ethical dimension and the antithesis of the concepts of security and privacy and the consequences for society and democracy due to the impossibility of finding a balance between these two concepts.