Il contesto di cui parla Daniel Solove nel suono editoriale per il
Boston Globe sono gli USA, per cui vari suoi ragionamenti vanno adattati
al contesto EU.
jc
*Privacy in Authoritarian Times*
Daniel Solove
/Crackdowns on immigrants. Surveillance of abortion providers and
abortion seekers. Harassment of critics. These maneuvers in the
demagogue’s playbook would be harder to pull off with better digital
privacy./
As the United States and much of the world turn back to the darkness of
authoritarianism that blighted the previous century, we must remember
that privacy is one of the bulwarks against the power of authoritarian
governments. Unfortunately, we’re living in a more intensive
surveillance society than ever before, and our privacy laws are ill
equipped to protect us against government access to our personal data.
In the years to come, the federal government and many state governments
might engage in surveillance and data gathering as they round up
immigrants, punish people for seeking, providing, or assisting
abortions, and attack gender-affirming health care. The government might
use personal data in its effort to retaliate against those who stand in
its way. Such efforts might be assisted by mobs of vigilantes who will
use personal data to dox, threaten, embarrass, and harm anyone they
don’t like — much like the way many people eagerly assisted totalitarian
regimes in finding “undesirables” and rooting out and punishing dissenters.
Our best hope for protection is that legislators in Massachusetts and
other states who are concerned about these risks take steps now to
upgrade their privacy laws.
Writing more than two decades ago, I critiqued how digital dossiers
existed for all of us <http://ssrn.com/abstract=313301> — extensive
repositories of personal data gathered by companies — and how the
government could readily gain access to this data. The Fourth Amendment
provides minimal to no protection for much of our personal data in the
digital age. This is because of the Third-Party Doctrine, a misguided
rule manufactured by the US Supreme Court in the 1970s that holds that
whenever personal data is in the hands of third parties, people no
longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in it — and as a result,
there’s no Fourth Amendment protection. The Third-Party Doctrine is
especially problematic and ill-suited to our modern times, when so much
of our personal data is in the hands of third parties such as credit
card companies, search companies, cloud service providers, online
merchants, data brokers, social media companies, and app creators.
When the government demands that companies turn over personal data and
let authorities use surveillance technologies, will companies refuse to
cooperate? If history repeats itself, the answer is no. Last century,
many companies supplied the Nazis with the technology
<https://time.com/5290043/nazi-history-eu-data-privacy-gdpr/> and
information they wanted
<https://www.magellantv.com/articles/nazi-data-science-the-dark-history-that-led-to-modern-data-laws>.
Here at home, when the federal government demanded data from companies
after 9/11, they readily turned it over — even when it was against their
own privacy policies. Even companies that are not eager to cooperate
often buckle under government pressure.
[...]
continua qui: https://teachprivacy.com/privacy-in-authoritarian-times/
