God forgives and forgets, the network doesn't. The slogan comes from the European commissioner for privacy, Viviane Reding, who together with the various privacy guarantors of the member countries has prepared a mega-measure to protect personal data, the diffusion of which on the web has become uncontrollable in recent years.
The provision aims to change forever what we mean by privacy protection and which tries to come to terms once and for all with the right to be forgotten in the age of the web. In a nutshell: do we have the right to make the information that concerns us disappear from the endless circuit that conveys it? And can we also do the same with things posted by others, but that can somehow embarrass us?
The answer was anticipated by Reding at the "Digital Life Design" conference in Munich, pending the set of rules and principles to be examined by the European Parliament. The first measure is a directive (it will therefore have to be implemented by each country), and concerns the protection of citizens' data for judicial measures, security measures and the police: "It provides for very protective data processing communication obligations for those who have been subjected to attention by the authorities" says the Privacy Guarantor Francesco Pizzetti.
The second provision is a regulation and concerns all other cases, in particular Internet. Here are the key points: a) it will no longer be up to the citizen to demonstrate the illegality of the use of their data but to the owner of the data to demonstrate the lawfulness; b) consent to the use of personal data must be explicit; c) any loss of data due to an IT attack must be communicated immediately (24 hours, according to the Reding); d) the public administration and companies with more than 50 employees must have a "data protection officer"; And) if someone's data is misused, the person responsible will still be liable; f) every new technological tool but also a simple application will have to evaluate the impact that its use will have on privacy (Pia, privacy impact assessment); g) it must be possible to have "data portability": that is, just as we can carry the telephone number with us by changing the operator, we must be able to bring our Facebook friends to another social network (a nice principle but impervious to implement).
It remains however the problem of what others wrote about us. For example Wikipedia, or newspaper archives. On this, Reding was decided: “Newspaper archives are an exception, the right to be forgotten cannot mean the right to erase history“. However, this exception seems dangerous, given that nowadays information is not only conveyed on official channels, but a lot on blogs and citizen journalism sites.
The two measures will be examined by the European Parliament on February 1st. And the path promises to be tortuous, given that the giants of the web, from Google to Yahoo and to Microsoft they seem to look at these rules with a wary eye, as they are excessively restrictive.
