The Rise And Fall Of Information Privacy

There are no secrets in the modern era. Everything is bared, aired, shared (…). Nothing is secret, privacy is dead, and the funeral will be broadcast live on the Reality Channel”, writes Israeli author Eshkol Nevo in his popular novel, Three Floors Up (2015). We are being watched. Big Brother is no longer a remote dystopia. Video surveillance in public spaces, the monitoring of mobile telephones, electronic communications and online activities have become widespread. Sir Edward Coke’s famous 17th-century declaration that “a man’s house is his castle” has been wildly breached in the digital age. The difference is that today, unlike in Orwell’s vision or in Bentham’s Panopticon, the all-seeing eye does no longer necessarily belong to the government alone, since many in the private sector “mine” the data collected by others, not to mention the data generously offered by the owners of information themselves. From among the many technological trends that are spurring these developments, the present article shall focus on four: the one device, the cloud, the social media and the collection of Big Data and the European struggle to control the phenomenon, by means of the recent and much acclaimed Regulation (EU) 2016/679, whose efficiency is yet far from being indisputable.