The Law of Privacy and Business Formulas
ALGORITHMS AND RESPONSIBILITY. HERE'S HOW YOU SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT BALANCE ON THE WEB, ACCORDING TO ORESTE POLLICINO OF BOCCONI'S DEPARTMENT OF LEGAL STUDIES“Some algorithms are like the Coca-Cola formula: a trade secret. Yet a recipe for syrup does not affect the functioning of the information society, nor the choices of citizens and Internet users”. Internet Law is one of the research areas of Oreste Pollicino, Full Professor at the Department of Law. The debate on algorithms, he says, is part of the broader unresolved issue of the exemption from editorial responsibilities for the online giants such as Google. Must they check any content published by users? If so, is it correct to confer this function to an algorithm instead of a human being? Is this kind of computerized control strong enough to exclude any liability? “The answer is: it depends on algorithms. Unfortunately, there is not enough transparency. We must seek a balance between the need to encourage pluralism and the need to protect the freedom of private economic initiative”. It is a global issue to which even EU legislation could not provide the final answer.
A lot of data centers are in the U.S., where freedom of expression is cherished. “Fundamental differences in values between Europe and the United States are at play. The most obvious is privacy. In Europe, it is a fundamental right and it may be infringed by algorithms that gather personal information by tracking Web activities”. The first step, Pollicino says, could be finding a cultural solution such as digital education. Processing personal data is not perceived as a real problem, especially by digital natives who seem uninterested in data protection issues. Internet allows us to make faster choices, without making the evaluations and the comparisons that we would do off line. “We live in a digital world, but the consequences are real. Sometimes we forget that our digital identity is not separable from our personal identity”.
Read the article by Emanuele Borgonovo on our lives with algorithms and how they enter the work of Bocconi researchers in various fields
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by Claudio Todesco
