The right to be oneself in the digital age: new challenges for personal identity between protection of individual dignity and European integration

Abstract

In 1985 the Italian Court of Cassation marked the end of the long-lasting and complex doctrinal and jurisprudential debate relating to the recognition of the right to personal identity, finding the foundation and full legitimation of this juridical situation in the personalist principle that liven up the Constitutional Charter. Almost forty years later that same need, never muted, emerges today with new and greater strength in a particularly complex scenario, characterized by technologies capable of collecting and processing information fragments of the individual’s personality. The massive use of personal data, supported by tools, such as those connected to AI, capable of «creating new knowledge» through a computing power never experienced before, set, in fact, new and significant challenges. Hence a need to analyze the perspectives for protecting personal identity in the current digital scenario, facing a technological phenomenon that seems to make the traditional boundaries between private and public increasingly blurred and fluid the territories in which personality takes shape, affecting the correct projection of personal identity within a technologically advanced society. Considering that the protection of personal identity connects to the «freedom-dignity» supreme principle guaranteed by the Italian Constitutional Charter in the hendiadys expressed by artt. 2 and 3 of the Constitution and hinged upon the art. 2 of the Treaty on European Union. A principle that needs to be preserved and protected as a common root of European constitutional experiences, and that becomes the pillar of a new fundamental phase of the European integration process in the digital age