New Technologies, Big Data and Human Rights: An Overview.

In the new economy, information is a fundamental economic resource that optimizes the relationship between supplier and user, in the direction of retaining the latter. In this context, it is evident how the pervasiveness of information technologies, mainly the Internet of Things, has facilitated digital surveillance practices, making anyone who uses a computer device connected to the network easily traceable and monitored by treating, in some cases even without the interested party is aware of it. The possibility of collecting, processing and crossing personal information as well as Big Data, progressively assimilates individuals to sensors in the environment and leads to a redefinition of individual self-determination capable of placing the knowledge and effectiveness of its guarantee on the center of reflection. The use of big data and the appropriate information technologies to extract knowledge from data pose pressing questions about a possible polarization of information in the hands of a few private subjects capable of questioning some fundamental human rights. Furthermore, the algorithmic logic of the predictive type, which permeates the entire process of extraction, collection and storage of Big Data, is profoundly changing the traditional mechanisms of power by introducing new decision-makers and raising unprecedented and pressing questions about any dangers of algorithmic discrimination between social groups groups perceived as external to the social fabric and marginalized through self-fulfilling predictions. A central critical issue then becomes how to reconcile the regulatory and prescriptive function of law with the logic of policies based on the widespread collection of information and expression of the direction of the prevailing forces. The essential respect for the person, in the double individual and collective dimension, necessarily inserts Big Data in the social context, configuring its use as a real asset, to be evaluated in relation to the specific purposes of employment.