The Privacy Paradox and Europe's Way Forward on Data Protection
<http://www.liberties.eu/en/news/lithuania-privacy-data-protection> At the Digital Rights Forum 2016, experts discussed the preparedness of companies to implement the General Data Protection Regulation and debated whether we really know what type of data protection people actually need. [] According to the assistant to the European Data Protection Supervisor, Christian D'Cunha, who spoke about the competitive advantages offered by privacy protection, privacy is necessary for the enjoyment of other rights - self expression, creation, innovation and, more recently, choosing what content to access online. "Three-quarters of all people now receive their news through social media, but your experiences there are determined by algorithms. When I sought solace in Facebook after Brexit, you would've thought that 95 percent of the people voted to stay, but that was obviously untrue." D'Cunha said that 91 percent of US residents feel that they can no longer control how companies use their data. "Last year, we visited the Silicon Valley, had meetings with companies and got the impression that the dominant business model nowadays is online behaviorist tracking." According to D'Cunha, the meetings revealed that it was very difficult to gain support from investors without showing how the company could monetize data. Companies wishing to escape this model would simply not attract investment. [] In the second half of the event, Natalija Bitiukova of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute talked about the privacy paradox and presented the study on the public's perceptions of data protection. According to Bitiukova, there is a clear gap between the people's intentions regarding giving access to their data and their behavior in practice. Furthermore, despite claiming that it's important to them, most people, when faced with a violation of their privacy, choose to not report it to any institution.
participants (1)
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Alberto Cammozzo