Surveillance And Profiling. Online Person’s Privacy Between Criminogenic Structures And Legal Paternalism

Cyberspace is an ambivalent place, where many activities overlap with real world ones and many others are peculiar to it, revealing its plasticity. The pace of technological innovation is still growing, together with new insidious forms of invasion of people’s private lives. There is still a strong temptation for us to waive our rights in order to enjoy the technological paradise we are offered. A new entity—the digital person—has made its appearance in the digital ecosystem, as a technological outcome of the reconfiguration of the classical concept of person. Our privacy is being progressively eroded away as a result of our increasing acquiescence, apathy and unconcern and our explicit support for measures sold to us as necessary and harmless. Though it is still too early to say that privacy is almost dead, new generations, whether they like it or not, are playing a leading role in a cultural praxis and in a primary socialization which are remote from the concept of privacy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and investigate whether or not it is still possible to introduce new effective forms of governance designed to defend children as digital persons: their rights to dignity, habeas data and personal data privacy.