This work proposes a necessarily partial and evolving reflection on the dynamics by which information technologies have progressively changed the definition and interaction between privacy and knowledge, focusing on crucial points from a legal point of view. The relevance of the debate that has developed in recent years, on these issues, is evidenced by numerous initiatives and measures—both European and international—which offer answers to phenomena such as the development of the internet of things and, more generally, to progress in computer science and robotics. From this perspective, uncertainties are raised concerning the necessary respect for privacy and individual dignity to be balanced with the right to inform and to be informed, as evidence of an effectively shared knowledge. The critical point of the question is, in any case, the identification of a flexible balance between freedom and constraint, considering the violation of privacy not only as a mere limitation of individual potential, but as a factor capable of undermining the core of personal freedoms.
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This essay initiates a, necessarily partial and evolving, reflection on the dynamics by which information technologies have progressively changed the definition and interaction between privacy and knowledge, focusing on crucial points from a legal point of view. The relevance of the debate that has developed in recent years, on these issues, is evidenced by numerous initiatives and measures - both European and international - which offer answers to phenomena such as the development of the Internet of Things and, more generally, to progress in computer science and robotics. From this perspective, uncertainties are raised concerning the necessary respect for privacy and individual dignity, to be balanced with the right to inform and to be informed, as evidence of an effectively shared knowledge.
In fact, in the new economy, information represents one of the main economic resources of the production process (Amato Mangiameli & Campagnoli, 2020; Rifkin, 2000), given that traditional markets give way to the IT network markets and ownership, as usually understood, is progressively replaced by the value of the possibility of access informations. In other words, information technologies - through which it is possible to exchange goods, services and knowledge outside the traditional intermediation processes - outline market forms characterized by an increasing use of de-territorialized assets (Amato Mangiameli & Campagnoli, 2020). “In the new network economy, what is actually being sold are images and ideas. The material form that these ideas and images take is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the production process. If the industrial era market was characterized by the exchange of objects, the new economy is characterized by access to concepts, contained in material form” (Rifkin, 2000). The ability to control and sell knowledge becomes the most sophisticated and profitable form of commercial exchange, so that the greatest profit comes not so much from production processes and products, but from the control of information and trends (Rifkin, 2000). The activities of collection, selection and monitoring of personal data, therefore, assume fundamental importance as they are aimed at building customer loyalty. The so-called database marketing is aimed, in fact, at the segmentation of customers, perfected up to segment of one, that is, set on personalized offers on the individual customers: in this regard, it is interesting to recall the formulation of the Unicity concept estimating the fraction of users uniquely identified by a number of randomly chosen information to which a potential interested party could have access (Longo & Scorza, 2020, pp. 133).