On ICT law, politics and other digital stuff
I sound like a broken record that nobody listens to when I say that in a moment of constitutional rights – the real ones – withholding “privacy” is the least of our concerns.
Nevertheless, many supporters of an extreme concept of “privacy” continue to oppose the general and generalized identification of infected people and people who have come into contact with us because the state “could abuse” it. Continue reading “COVID-19, privacy zealots and the abuse of “might” in Italy”
Cambridge University Press’ International & Comparative Law Quarterly published a review authored by Rebecca Moosavian of Protecting Personal Information.
“Experts” and public institutions are reluctant to use of geolocation data held by mobile phone operators to backtrack COVID-19 infected people. The reason is that as “the cell-phone mesh is too wide” and GPS is not precise, the data obtained would be unreliable. This fact, according to them, would justify the use of other instruments – and in particular, of “apps” – to be installed more or less mandatory on people’s smartphones.
It is unclear if these “experts” considered that not everyone could or wants to have a “smart” phone. Therefore, more than a few could go around with an old “stupid” but less intrusive mobile phone affecting the overall efficiency of the solution. Continue reading “COVID-19: who is afraid of patients’ geolocalization?”
“Apps” are multiplying for tracking users affected by COVID-19 and also in Italy – it seems – institutions are evaluating similar solutions while private entities have already developed software of this sort.
Inevitable, and often inappropriate, the alarms for the “violation of privacy” – as if the necessary limitations of the other fundamental rights that we are suffering were nothing at all – and those invoking the GDPR (which, I repeat ad nauseam, does not apply to the protection of public order and security, national security and other associated misfortunes and disasters). But this does not mean that it would be good to overlook the principles of the GDPR. Even putting aside regulatory precepts approaches based on need-to-know (do I need – or right – to process specific data? And who receives them?) and secure software design (OWASP exists “regardless” of the GDPR) are fundamental elements for the functioning of a digital ecosystem, especially in times of emergency. Continue reading “COVID-19: Is the app that tracks users illegal?”
Working remotely (which has nothing “smart”, by the way) is a convenient choice from the point of view of a company (which can cut organizational costs and risks, even criminal ones), a little less so from that of the employee who, in the name of an apparent “freedom” is, little by little, in a barbaric isolation, similar to house arrest, which accentuates its role as an anonymous cog in a mechanism larger than him. Continue reading “COVID-19, smartworking and GDPR in Italy”