Privacy

The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights establishes a modern and harmonised data protection framework across the EU. It stipulates that EU citizens have the right to protection of their personal data. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her and to the access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. The European Commission put forward its EU Data Protection Reform in January 2012 to make Europe fit for the digital age. More than 90% of Europeans say they want the same data protection rights across the EU – and regardless of where their data is processed. Currently much of this wealth of information is held by just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them. The regulation is an essential step to avoid data monopolies and misuse and to strengthen citizens’ fundamental rights in the digital age.

One of the main concerns in mobility sharing applications is the exposure of personal data provided to the system due to the associated increase in vehicle/infrastructure electronics and communications.

Transportation and location data can reveal personal habits, preferences, and behaviours. Riders could not be willing to share their whereabouts or the exact location of the origin and/or destination of their trips. In addition, it is known that privacy pays a price in terms of decreased efficiency of the mobility sharing system: location privacy-preserving techniques could affect the performance of mobility sharing applications, in terms of both System Efficiency and Quality of Service (Martelli et al., 2020).
Paradoxically, despite the public preoccupation on the matter, we have experienced since the late 2000s a boom in the popularity of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). Web 2.0 – also called Social Web – facilitates participatory information sharing and collaboration on the Internet, and through these websites many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. Security and privacy issues result from the large amounts of information these sites process. Features that invite users to participate in – messages, invitations, photos, open platform applications and other applications – are often the venues for others to gain access to a user’s private information. Cinema is the one place where intrusions into our private sphere are dealt with certain frequency, and almost always in a dystopian way. Movies such as “Gattaca” and the use of genetic data; “Das Leben der Anderen” (The Lives of Others) and totalitarian surveillance (Figure below); or “Minority Report” and the rights of privacy in a media-dominated world – depict a world where technology and surveillance systems are all-pervasive. This raises some scepticism as whether the new generations will be aware of the importance of protecting one’s privacy or how to learn it.