El derecho a la intimidad: entre la "seguridad nacional" y el mercado de datos

Abstract

Politics of “national security” practiced by Western Goverments and the creation of a personal data market are turning the Society of Information in a survey and control society. One of the groups that is being especially affected by these politics is the one of foreign residents. In Spain, for instance, the Law allowes the police the access to the foreign resident’s data picked up by the city authorities. In fact, the creation of a new infomartion market for personal data has made the interference in the personal sphere of citizens not an individual and casual matter but a sistematic and constant one. In this context, the transformation of human genetic data in a commodity handed by biotechnological companies is a very real danger. In the society of information, the chance for the citizen to act freely in the public sphere depends deeply on his chance of building in an autonomous way his private sphere. The changing of the sequence “person-information-secret” into the sequence “person-information-control” makes privacy not a matter of the private sphere but a constitutive element of the citizenship.