Discussions about privacy and personal sovereignty in social networks should start with general questions. What is privacy in the context of the human

Personal Privacy and Sovereignty in Social Networks

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2021-06-07 03:30:03

Discussions about privacy and personal sovereignty in social networks should start with general questions. What is privacy in the context of the human presence in cyberspace? What constitutes personal sovereignty in the digital world? Could a social network have something like sovereignty? Who will defeat whom – a whale or an elephant – if a whale is a network, and an elephant is a state?

We know that the inviolability of private life is a fairly traditional, “analogue” human right, which is guaranteed by the constitutions of many countries throughout the world, including Russia. But in the digital world, in particular in social networks, the “analogue” right to privacy is being transformed into a “digital” individual right, which in reality depends on its recognition by the state, the operator of the social network and the person himself. In turn, both the social network and the person have some signs of sovereignty in cyberspace, and in this regard, they become like the state, almost on the same level, which leads to the emergence of inevitable interactions between them. Much depends on how such “digital” human rights and interactions are regulated in reality, rather than just on paper. Here I mean the inviolability of the digital personality, the right to be forgotten, the right to access information technology, etc.

All these rights are included in a certain commonality, which can be conditionally called the sovereignty of an individual. What constitutes the sovereignty of an individual? First, the recognition of one’s inherent dignity, which, as stated in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is related to “all members of the human family”. Second, as the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation points out, Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation imposes on the state not only the passive duty of abstaining from interfering with the freedom of the individual, but also an active (positive) duty to provide assistance in the practical implementation by an individual of his rights and freedoms. The list of these rights is extensive. However, keeping in mind the topic of our discussion, we will highlight those that are most important for a person in the environment of social networks and Big Data: the right to access the Internet, the right to personal data, the right to be forgotten, the right to access Internet technologies, the right to refuse Internet technologies, the right to mental inviolability, digital privacy, the right to a name, to an image, etc.

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