The importance of guaranteeing the privacy of information

For the Special Rapporteur on the rights to privacy of the United Nations General Assembly, Joe Cannataci, data is and will be a key economic asset, as capital and labour. For this reason, it has recently urged the public and private sectors to review the way they currently share some data, highlighting the importance of guaranteeing people's privacy.

In all likelihood any of us have recently been surfing the Internet, reading news on the Web, making some online purchases, or simply walking through our cities with our mobile phones in our pocket as part of our daily routines. However, it is also very likely that we may not have been fully aware of the large amount of data we have been producing and the digital fingerprint we have created as a result of those seemingly harmless interactions. In addition, we must also bear in mind that a large amount of the data we are talking about have not really been provided consciously and intentionally, but were obtained or deduced through the observation of our daily actions and our behaviour.

As a consequence, every day increase the amount of data in circulation, being many of them personal data. Therefore, in the context of open data initiatives and the explosion of data economy, it seems easy to understand why an increasing number of organizations, including the United Nations, call for caution and for the existence of a specific and adequate legal framework that must be followed to ensure the correct management of the information. This framework clearly establishes the rules of the game applicable to these increasingly frequent data transactions, moving away from the purely capitalist perception of the data prevailing so far and recognizing the much more complex control dynamics that govern the data world.

In this regard, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has quickly become a global reference since its recent introduction, establishing a series of fundamental data rights. These rights include some concepts that have already existed in many other data protection frameworks for a long time, such as the right of access to personal data, to rectification or to restriction of processing. However, as a great novelty, the GDPR also introduces some more innovative rights such as the right to personal data portability or the restriction on automated decision making with legal effects that are based on personal data. On the other hand, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also stipulates that citizens have the right to privacy and the protection of their personal data.

The availability of all the rights established in the European data protection regulation will undoubtedly also serve to strengthen those fundamental rights. However, reaching a correct balance between an adequate protection and other legitimate interests for data publication is not always a simple task, and that is why there are more voices in favour of going one step further and establish a series of specific fundamental rights that each person must have regarding to their data, evolving from the mere concept of data possession and commercialization towards the establishment of the necessary dynamics around the data to be able to guarantee a free and autonomous participation in our society.

In this way, the foundations of a new legislative wave could solve the problems that arise around the data - such as misinformation, abuse, respect for anonymity, reidentification or online tracking and surveillance – and, thanks to this wave, both individuals and communities could finally be considered an equal and active part in the existing data ecosystem.

Similarly, open data may continue to be a key tool for innovation and economic growth, but we could also have to guarantee that economic growth through data would never be at the expense of our privacy or the rights that we have established on our own data.

Content prepared by Carlos Iglesias, Open data Researcher and consultan, World Wide Web Foundation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author