“From bioethics to artificial intelligence, from the private powers of platforms to cyberbullying; from hate speech to (digital) oblivion; from the digital invisibles of the gig economy to telemedicine: in all of these and other contexts, the ombudsman’s office is making its contribution to protecting those who experience digital solitude…,” Stanzione told lawmakers.
“Loneliness is the first condition of total submission,” the ombudsman added, quoting Foucault.
“Counteracting it is the objective that this office pursues every day,” Stanzione continued.
On artificial intelligence, the ombudsman said its development must be steered “in a direction that is compatible with the protection of the individual”.
“There must be a direction and a limit, ethical and legal, to technology’s infinite desire for power, to what has been defined as ‘playing God’, to protect the dignity of the person”, otherwise it risks becoming “more and more opaque, while people will become more and more transparent, according to the idea of the glass man so dear to systems that are anything but democratic,” Stanzione said.
No less negligible risks are posed by the metaverse, which the ombudsman said “is destined to have diriment (nullifying) implications on society and on contemporary anthropology itself”.
He insisted that “all necessary measures” need to be taken “to prevent an excessive dependence, especially of young people, on this almost oneiric dimension, which is capable of alienating them from reality and free them from their relationship with it, projecting them into the space of the infinitely possible”.
Stanzione also highlighted the need to reflect on the “spasmodic search by young people for ‘visibility’ on social networks, pushed to the point of putting the lives of others at risk” or “of sacrificing the life of a child for an extra like”, alluding to the recent fatal car crash in Rome in which a SUV driven at speed by a group of YouTubers filming a video for a social challenge rammed into a Smart, killing a five-year-old boy.
If this is the result of increasing alienation from reality and the transfer of life on-line, Stanzione said rebuilding “a collective conscience that takes into account the effects on relationships, of the digitalisation of everything” must be a “priority”.
The privacy ombudsman consequently urged for the creation of a legal and ethical statute on neo-technologies that “promotes their development to the maximum, but at the service of the person, of solidarity, of fundamental rights”.
Stanzione also said it is crucial to set a limit for the independent access of minors to the internet in order to prevent the risk of exposure to content that is potentially harmful to the development of their personality.
“Now, it is not a question of prohibiting the use of social networks, but certainly of making them safer; for minors first and foremost,” he concluded.
ANSA
