“Without regulations, new technologies can lead to a surveillance regime, where human beings become non-persons, individuals that must be trained, categorized, uniformed or left out”, as declared by Antonello Soro, the Italian Data Protection Authority, at a conference during the European Data Protection Day.
The speech shows how crucial data protection is for the preservation of democracy in our hyper-connected and hyper-communicative world.
The problem, went on the Italian DPA, is that “data is considered a simple digit to take advantage of, without taking into account its impact on the individual, making him an abstract entity without individuality, and therefore without dignity. This is done not just for profit or to create illiberal state policies, but simply because of the habit of transferring data inattentively and indiscriminately, giving away fragments of freedom, which incorporate more and more relationships between people and power relations.
Institutions and citizens must not surrender to this habit, which erodes democracy and autonomy in decision-making processes.
More about Soro’s speech:
https://www.privacy.it/2019/01/29/giornata-europea-protezione-dati-2019-soro/
Find out more about “surveillance capitalism”: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
