Today is January 28th, and like every year for quite some time now, we find ourselves celebrating European Data Protection Day. It’s something that started around 2006, to commemorate the signing of Convention 108, which ultimately became the granddaddy of everything we use today to protect ourselves from digital snoops. It’s not a party with balloons, mind you, but it serves to remind us that our data isn’t just bits floating in the void.
It always feels like emptying the sea with a teaspoon, especially when you realize that every click you make leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind you as if you were Tom Thumb in a forest of servers.
But data protection is a serious matter, a kind of fence we try to keep up despite the strong winds of wild marketing and certain apps that ask permission even to find out what you had for breakfast.
There’s a lot of talk about GDPR , which is actually the regulation that has filled our websites with cookie banners that we all accept without reading because we’re in a hurry to watch a cat video or read the news. Yet that pile of rules is the only thing stopping some random company from selling our medical history or our nightly movements to the highest bidder. It’s a frayed, imperfect defense, but it’s there.
Then there’s the issue of minors, which is a bit of a mess because kids surf everywhere and parents often don’t know what a VPN is. Today, we try to explain that privacy isn’t about hiding something because you have a guilty conscience, but rather about having the keys to your own home and deciding who can come in and take a look and who stays out on the sidewalk.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s already too late, if the profiles they’ve built of us aren’t more accurate than a mirror in the early morning, or that old aunt who always knows everything about everyone.
Every time we use a “free” service, the price is us (everyone says it but it’s true), or rather, that mountain of preferences, schedules and fears that we give away by pressing ” allow ” without looking and reading thoroughly.
Now the news is focused on Chat Control , which on paper is supposed to protect children— and rightly so —but in practice risks turning into a peering eye that peers into every one of our private messages. Privacy is indeed a strange, somewhat unbalanced trade-off, one we make almost by inertia while waiting for the bus or standing in line at the post office.
The Italian Data Protection Authority occasionally issues a few noticeable fines, but the point isn’t just to punish those who make mistakes after the damage is done. The real challenge is understanding how to harness artificial intelligence to make predictions about who we are and what we’ll want to buy in six months.
It’s actually a slippery slope, like walking on eggshells while someone is yelling in your ear to run faster.
Some say that privacy is dead and that we should resign ourselves to it (and watching this video really demoralizes us), but this “mantra” seems like an excuse to avoid bothering to read a few lines of information every now and then.
Of course, I’m not suggesting you read fifty-page contracts written in thick legalese—it would take a college degree just to figure out where the name ends and the unfair clause begins. However, knowing we have the right to request that our data be deleted is something, a small superpower we forget we have in our pockets.
Europe is somewhat at the top of the class in this regard, or at least it tries (and holds us back on other things), trying to set limits that are only dreamed of elsewhere. It’s not that we’re the best in the world, but at least here we discuss ethics and algorithms without thinking solely and exclusively about next quarter’s revenue.
It’s a somewhat romantic vision, perhaps, or it’s the romanticism of this day that makes me think so.
Ultimately, this day is about making us look up from the screen and ask ourselves: who has my face saved in the facial recognition databases? We must be careful not to become paranoid, or we’ll end up living in a bunker, but a modicum of awareness never killed anyone.
Rather, it serves to remind us that our identity is our own, not a shelf product to be sold off at a penny a pop.
At the end of the day, data protection is a matter of individual freedom , even if it sounds like something written by AI or from a middle school civics textbook. But it’s true.
If someone knows everything about you, can predict what you’ll do, and if they can predict what you’ll do, well, then your freedom starts to fade a little around the edges , becoming a kind of path guided by someone else you’ve never even met.
I conclude with a comment from Drew Bagley, VP and Counsel, Privacy and Cyber Policy at CrowdStrike: ” European Data Protection Day reminds us that privacy and cybersecurity are destined to win or fail together, and that these strategies must always be aligned. Now that artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into all business environments, driving workflows and the constant movement of data, we tend to almost take this new paradigm of information access and sharing for granted. However, true protection depends on the availability of visibility, privacy by design, and resilience that operate in real time .”
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