Educating the public about privacy

On 28 January 2008, the second annual Data Protection Day will take place, organized by the Council of Europe, with different events planned in the different member states. The aim of this initiative is to raise awareness amongst citizens about how personal data is collected about them, why, and what is done with these data. It also aims to help European citizens understand what are their rights when it comes to data protection issues in several fields of their everyday life: health care, work, their relations with public authorities and when using and surfing the Internet.

In Italy the day will be marked by an initiative by the Garante della Privacy (the Italian data protection authority) particularly aimed at schools, in order to educate high school children about the privacy risks and rights, as well as the opportunities, provided by new technologies, such as the Internet and mobile phones.

This initiative coincides with today’s decision by the Italian Garante della Privacy that mobile phone and Internet service providers will not be allowed anymore to store personal data on users’ online activities. In particular, ISPs will be obliged to delete within two months all information on IP addresses, i.e. the websites visited by users, and on users’ queries and search terms/strings entered in search engines. This is in order to prevent ISPs to be able to reconstruct profiles of users in terms of their political, sexual or religious preferences and health condition on the basis of their online activities.

* For initiatives on Data Privacy Day in North America the event “Data Privacy in Transatlantic Perspective: Conflict or Cooperation?” is being held at the Duke University Center for European Studies.