Privacy and surveillance are the new obligations.
Interview with Attorney Fulvio Sarzana of the Sarzana e Associati law firm in Rome
in L'Espresso, on newsstands on January 16.
Lawyer and university professor Fulvio Sarzana is extremely critical of age-identification requirements and, more generally, access-blocking control systems.
“These control methods should not be adopted as a form of generalized “blocking” of content because this system, besides being useless, could also be harmful.
If we look at the interactions that take place between young people on social networks, we realise that things are much more varied than how they are portrayed to us.
Young people, often very young, are aware of many more circumvention systems than the legislators, with regulations often completely unrelated to the technological context, try to combat, and so they often surf the internet using the cell phones of relatives or friends, sometimes even exchanging accounts or using adult profiles, who knows how they obtained them.
All this leaves room for a “false” technological tranquility that is very dangerous in itself because it gives the illusion of security, when the reality is completely different.
Even more dangerous is the tool of blocking platforms like VPNs, which are instead cornerstones of freedom, especially in countries where freedom of communication is neither the norm nor the practice.
Let us think about what can happen during a popular uprising under a dictatorial regime and the possibility of evading anti-democratic surveillance using these tools of freedom.
Penalizing platforms across the board to push them to protect only certain rights under penalty of blocking all access brings these attempts closer to those of dictatorial regimes that wish to allow only the content they want to see through.
It must be said that the European Union, in a bid to balance the demands of control and the protection of freedom, unlike what happened, for example, in the United States, where there has been a heated public debate and strong judicial pressure aimed at limiting federal and state powers of control, or even limiting the "private" power of platforms (think of the Trump-Twitter case), has decided to intervene with regulations such as the Digital Services Act and others, which have given the impression of authorizing national institutions to adopt control tools.
The proliferation of EU regulations, which began with the GDPR and continued with a series of subsequent regulations, not least the AI ACT, has thus embraced a logic of administrative control over tools that should instead remain in the hands of individuals, thereby depriving those who should have control over minors, such as families, of responsibility. They should be involved in the child's technological development.
Privacy and surveillance: the new obligations
English 
Italian 