In Italy we are more or less in the Johnny Stecchino situation. It is a 1991 film, directed and starring Roberto Benigni in which he is the double, unbeknownst to him, of a mafia boss. When he arrives in Palermo a man tells him that Sicily and Palermo in particular have a terrible plague that “defames” them. One expects that one to say “the mafia” and instead exclaims: “The traffic!”.
Here Italy is in that situation there: we have a public debt that will take generations to pay off, one of the highest levels of youth unemployment in Europe, the pandemic has penalized above all the women who were already starting behind, the economy is in knee, our delay on digital puts us at the bottom of all the charts, yet if we listen to what we read around, “Italy has a terrible scourge” to be eradicated: privacy.
Those in charge have not been involved in anything else for days. And authoritative commentators have amplified the problem by making its solution urgent, no longer postponable. The message is that “too much privacy protection can block the recovery”. If we are all poorer, if the Recovery Plan fails it will not be due to our inability to ground concrete and useful projects on schedule, but because there is privacy. As if the other European countries did not have the exact same rules (the GDPR), as if the personal freedoms of citizens were in contrast with the need of those who command to act quickly.
To justify this thesis, two authentic lies are adduced, but we know how fake news works, no matter how fake it is, but how many times it is repeated. After a while they become true. The first lie asserts that the Immuni app has failed due to too much privacy, because the Guarantor opposed, as in the rest of Europe, the mass surveillance of South Korean model citizens; not because public health was not important, but because that filing was not necessary to contain the virus; and why small advances on that front would turn us into an authoritarian state. Immuni has gone bankrupt because, although 10 million people have downloaded it, most regions have never adopted it and health professionals have not entered the positive cases found. For information, contact the Ministry of Health which has never believed it. Second lie: due to privacy, we risked losing the Green Pass. “The government had to overcome the verbose and meticulous opinion of the Guarantor,” wrote a prince of law. But that opinion highlighted the fact that some personal data of Italian citizens users of the IO app ended up on non-European servers, before it was not known. Knowing it was useful, except to be scandalized in the event that they were stolen and put up for sale on the web. And then, as a result of that opinion, the Green Pass did not delay a single day. That dialectic between institutions between part of the normal democratic process of checks and balances.
in conclusion Italy has a terrible plagueIt is true, but it is not privacy: it is those who try to limit people’s rights when it is not necessary instead of dealing with the real reasons why we are a slow country to innovate.
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