New realities, new rights. Some reflections on the need to safeguard personal data

• Author: Laura Miraut Martín
• Pages: 24-47

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New realities, new rights.

Some relections on the need to safeguard

personal data

Laura Miraut Martín1



I. INTRODUCTION

Today’s technological development has brought with it a rethinking of

many socially relevant issues. Human rights represent the axiological paradigm

of our time, the concept in which the demands imposed by personal dignity are

made concrete. Among these demands, the need to protect personal privacy

from external interference has traditionally stood out. Obviously, such external

interference may be of a different nature and may occur with particular intensity

in certain historical contexts. The greater the attack on privacy, the greater the

need to fine-tune the instruments of defence of personal privacy.

People’s intimate data are in a particularly sensitive situation in this respect.

Technological development has provided sufficient tools to those who hold the

real power in society to control our lives by knowing all the data that make up

our individual identity. Of course, this real power is not always in the hands

1 Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Coordinator

of the Research Group “The judicial decision. Special consideration of the migratory problem”

and coordinator of the Educational Innovation Group “Jurists facing the challenge of European

convergence” at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.



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of the state and public institutions. Private individuals, companies and private

organisations also currently accumulate a situation of real power that allows them

access, sometimes very easily, to the knowledge of people’s intimate data. And

they do not hesitate to put these instruments into action when they understand

that this will provide them with a significant economic benefit. The need to

protect oneself against the actions of private individuals who have significant

technological power is obvious, because they are, unquestionably, sources of

risk to personal privacy. Certainly, when technological power is in the hands of

public authorities, the matter takes on a special aspect because public authorities

can invoke reasons of general interest to invade personal privacy. For example,

reasons of public safety, public health, etc…

It is therefore necessary to identify with the utmost precision the dangers

that threaten personal privacy in our times and the reasons that could justify a

certain restriction of this right to personal privacy, if necessary endorsing the

use of contemporary technological instruments for the knowledge and storage of

individuals’ personal data. Always assuming that, as is the case with other rights,

the right to personal privacy is not an absolute right, which does not admit any

type of restriction whatsoever.

The right to the protection of personal data arises in this context of social

awareness of the extreme risk that contemporary technological development

represents for personal privacy and of the usefulness that this same technological

progress can represent for the achievement of certain relevant social objectives.

The magnitude of the invasive capacity of technological tools to invade our

privacy means that more emphasis is usually placed on the need to protect

personal privacy than on anything else.

Data protection seems in principle to have a scope and meaning of its own

that allows it to be distinguished from the more traditional manifestations of

the right to privacy. To begin with, it is a right that affects us all, because no

one is free from the fact that those who in fact hold technological power can

project it in an improper use that could completely empty our privacy. Moreover,

in the case of the right to data protection, the subject who may put our privacy

at risk is not individually identified either, because our privacy can potentially

be put at risk by whoever in fact holds the technological power, be it a private

individual, a company or a public authority. Finally, the very capacity to achieve

relevant social objectives that the knowledge and storage of personal data entails

represents an additional danger to personal privacy, because it is very easy to fall