Privacy and Data Protection. What is this Thing Called Privacy?

Good afternoon to everybody. I will speak of privacy. I will speak of the world. Privacy. What privacy means, you know, I, I'm not a technologist. I am a psychiatrist philosopher, psycho Analyst, so that the, the worst person to speak of technological issues. And indeed, I will speak of words. Nice is one. Okay. What is the, the, this one?

Okay, great. So let's start with etymology. I will use etymology quite often in this presentation. I repeat because I love words, but also for a practical reason, etymology allows to open words, to capture meanings and nuances, and in such a way to up open our mind also to different ideas to it, it, it allows thinking a bit out of the box. It is the reason why I'm using etymology and the goal of my presentation. So privacy refers to the state of something, which is separated secluded from others. The state of, of being set apart. This is the late etymology.

Well, if I ask you what could be the attribute of privacy in comparison with the attribute of public, which is the opposite. If I ask you, if, do you think that that the public is invisible or is visible?

No, probably most of you will answer would answer. Public is visible while something which is private is hidden, is less visible.

Well, let me show you this picture in this picture. You see it very well. You see her very well. There is a nice lady. Do you see her? It's a model called Nadine and she's nude. Could you see her?

Well, this is Nadine and Nadine pay attention. You can say Nadine is a ma no, no, no, no, no. Nadin is not hidden. Nadin is completely exposed. So exposed as exposed as she she's nude, but she's using a technique called the military technique called camouflage, which is the essence of this technique. Nadine cannot be distinguished, cannot be distinct from the environment, the context, the surroundings.

Okay, don't forget this picture. We will use it later on. Now let's move with definition with move on with definition privacy. This is one of the, the, the oldest definition of privacy, which is still to me, one of the best it is the definition provided at the end of the 19th century, but American judge Louis Brune, which is the, the right to be left alone. Let's compare. Now this definition, the previous definition, which this, which is most recent one, which is privacy, is the condition of not having undocumented personal information known or processed by others.

Are they speaking of the same thing? Come on, they are speaking of two different things. They call privacy something which is completely different. According to Brande, privacy was a right, is a right particular kind of right to be left alone. And it's difficult to understand what it means exactly, but it is right here. It is an issue of ownership. And indeed we are, this is a good example of the confusion we are doing between privacy and personal data protection, which are two different things. As I I'm going to, to show you.

And the more we frame privacy in terms of personal data protection, the more we think of privacy in terms of something to be hidden of something, to be masked and anonymous, as taken as a symbol, the mask anonymity is the ideal rebellion against the surveillance society. This is the slogan, but think again, to Nadine Nadine, you cannot see Nadine because Nadine had no mask tried to imagine if Nadine had a black mask on the face, you can immediately see her in the picture. So the fact to be AASK to be completely exposed, nude, made Nadine and visible.

If she had a mask, she could be very visible Data protection. The idea of personal data is a consequence of the idea of data. The idea of data is probably the ma the most important concept of the information revolution with information revolution is a technological event in which we learned how to turn information, which was chiefly quantitative, how to turn information into qu, which was chiefly qualitative, sorry, to turn information into a quantitative item.

So to turn information into digits, turning information into digits is not a trivial event because it turn turns information into a commodity. Something that can be marketed can be traded, can be stored, can be handled, can be manipulated. This happened only twice in the history. As far as we know, in the history of humans pieces, it happened with agricultural revolution, nomadic people for hundred thousand of years, human beings lived on the planet earth as a pneumatic population. They chased animals, white animals. They gathered vegetables through it.

They had value vegetables in animals, but they were not commodities. When they became commodities. They became commodities in the moment in which when farming was invented, animals and plants were domesticated. And in that moment, they became farming product. They become, they became commodities and these change it, everything. This is the beginning of human ization for us Something. And it lasted millennia something similar after with industrial revolution, with industrial revolution.

Again, we invented created a new commodity, not from nothing, not from scratch, from something which was existent. What we turned into a commodity human label, human labor existed earlier. Well before then industrial revolution, of course, but what they paid, they paid skills, knowledge, power products, work products. With the industrial revolution. We started paying working hours working time, which is a completely unthinkable idea for millennia for the previous millennia.

If you, if you tell a Roman, a Greek, an Egyptian that someone could tell could sell his time, no, what doesn't mean? Make sense? Does it mean, and it was possible tends to a technological innovation, the mechanical clock. It was the mechanical clock, enabling technology of the industrial revolution, because it allows people to sell their, their work. Their time working time, the working class is not the class of people who work. Everybody work. The working class is the class of people who sell day working hours. They labor time. And of course, a new commodity generates a Sur plus of value.

It is a driver for innovation in thinkable. And the third and with, with the industrial revolution was summarized by Benjamin Franklin with this saying, time is money, which is not the saying in all the saying, it is quite recent. It was invented by Benjamin Franklin. So at the beginning of industrial revolution, and today, what is happening is that we are creating a new commodity. And the new commodity is data, which is information translated into digits. And so information is money today.

And so you can understand at this point, you can understand the confusion between privacy and, and, and personal data protection because personal data protection, concern, and economic asset, while privacy concerns in individuals concerning human rights is that two different gains. The more you frame privacy in terms of personal data protection, the more privacy becomes privacy, announcing technology, privacy, impact assessment, and ity.

This kind of things you are, I think I'm suppose you are quite familiar with, but the consequence is that privacy becomes more and more an issue, a matter dealt with by lawyers, legal departments. I, I like them a lot. I have nothing against lawyers. I think that personal data protection is an important, very important fundamental issue of modern society, but said, so it is not. Privacy is another thing. So privacy personal data is about, Economica said, privacy is about individuality.

Again, let me use etymology. What does it mean? Individuality is made of two words in which is a negative particle duality in is invisible, not visible, impossible, not possible. So not duality. What is duality duality is to do well, do it do well in Italian? So individuality means invisibility. It is late in word for ATO in Greeks. Was that something that cannot be split in two? It is the last unique single individual.

And actually we use in English and in other languages as well, individual as synonymous of person, we speak of person or individual like the same entity and person as again, an expected surprise person comes again. It is not my fault if late in has generated. So many words, person comes from the late in again from the late in persona and persona and late in Rome meant by and large the same things. It means person today, but originally person persona was the mask.

The name persona was invented, was created to describe, to speak of the mask, the theatrical mask, and the, the demo of persona is per sound, augmented voice per persona, per sound, augmented voice augmented sound. Why? Because the mask was made in such a way to amplify like a megaphone the voice of the actor, the actor's voice. And this was, there are many religious reasons, but I don't don't want to enter into this. Let me just to speak of the practical reason. Romans had very large theaters. You should imagine that an am theater can have more than 1000 seats.

Could you imagine the person, the last ranks, what they could hear on sea on the stage? Almost nothing. So the mask was fundamental to give actors on the stage, a phase that is to say any density and to give them a voice mask, provide voice and identity. And it is so true that in the classic anti ethnicity, the idea of mask was a positive idea for us to mask. Something is to vibe is to have something to conceal, but on the country, in the ethnicity mask were symbol of the richness of the human soul, of the nuances of a human being who were mare people, OUS people were the rude people.

The poor people, these slaves were called OUS. These slaves had no name. They had the master name, sometimes a nickname, no identity at all. And they were called OUS. The first thing which happened when the court freed a slave was to give a name to the slave and to provide him with identity. Yeah. Over time. Yeah.

I'm, I'm going quite RA that I start late. So privacy is not about hiding, but it is, it is about masking, but it is not by hiding, but it is about providing identity people with an identity. So the essential element in privacy, when you provide an identity and individuality is something which is distinct from, remember Nadine, Nadine is invisible because she confused she's blended with the environment. But if you need to emerge as an individual, there should be some borders. Boundaries are fundamental. And privacy is basically the whole of boundaries, which describe an individual.

There are bodily boundaries. You all know the idea of personal space. You are probably familiar with this idea. I would like only to draw your attention that bodily boundaries have a neurological basis. People with the lesion of a certain area of the brain called amygdala, they don't have the perception of personal space. Mental boundaries, mental boundaries are extremely important to create the individual, the identity, because the child has a feeling of confusion with his environment.

It doesn't feel himself distinct from the mother and how he start understanding, recognizing the inward from the outward in the moment in which he discovers that his mind cannot be read that five minutes over five minutes over. So can you, I, I, I, I'm about to close in that moment. The child discovers that He has an internal life and the reason eternal life, the internal life is his private life. And this is the demonstration that the, the, the saying is not saying that the formula you have nothing to, to, to, to hide nothing, to fear, don't fear.

If you have nothing to hide, don't fear surveillance. No, the problem of people is not what they have to hide. We need to hide not because we have something that we fear we need to hide because our identity is based on our experience that we can hide something. Hiding is a fundamental experience. The moment in with the child learn to lie is extremely important. Then there is value boundaries. I can speak of them, but this is can just Get to Uniqueness. But this bike about uniqueness. Dignity is defined in, well, this is the last we are drop of waters.

Privacy is the surface tension, which creates our identity, privacy identity and dignity are the same thing. And this has also some practical and technological that you probably can guess. Yeah.