Data Protection and Rule of Law: A Challenging Perspective

Every person has the right to a legal identity, the right to recognition as a person before the law, enabling that person to assert rights, enforce contracts, assert or defend a case in court. This right is freestanding thus, not dependent on official identification, and it has been recognized and codified in different international human rights treaties (UDHR in 1948, ICCPR), and in the modern Constitutions. However, in today’s globalized world, there is an increase in linking access to services such as health, education, etc., to possession of several form of identification that, while collecting evidence of people life events, grant them digital identity. To this aim, the most advanced technological tools are used to solve the challenges of traditional weak identification systems and, relying on modern technology, several forms of identification have been presented, studied and still implemented (Allen, C. 2016). In most developed countries, this approach follows the scrutiny of democratic institutions, committees and boards, raising questions linked to de-anonymization problems and focused on privacy and data protections. Concerning less developed countries, some authors (Johnston, S.F. 2018) argue that technology seems to represent a “technological fix” thus, a generic tool for circumventing problems commonly conceived as social, political or cultural. In these contexts, indeed, these systems certainly represents a valuable tool for granting civil rights, but also represents a valuable source of statistics, used as a key tool for shaping public interventions and allowing policy making based on forecasting, for monitoring new trends and planning feasible policies (UN Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, 2014). Often, in such contexts, the rule of law is weak and data collected with technological systems of identification can be misused, leading not only to a greater concentration of power in the hands of non-governmental organizations, but also to complex relationships between asymmetric information and power (Khan & Roy, 2019). It emerges the need of brainstorming on whether group privacy (Taylor, L., van der Sloot, B., and Floridi, L. 2017) remains the main problem, or whether new scenario can emerge, primarily depending on local context and local perception.