What is secret, what is confidentiality, what is privacy in Coronavirus times

(by Biagino Costanzo - AIDR member and co-founder of KNOSSO) In times of health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the debate is also becoming central on the application desired by the Government but not yet operational, called, for the moment, "Immune". More has been said about the usefulness of its use and the risks of using it.

By trying to clarify a bit by simplifying, it was understood that the app can be downloaded, on a voluntary and free basis, from the Android play store and from the Apple store for iOS devices (the download will therefore not be available, at least initially, on Windows Phone, on feature phones and on Android phones without the play store).

The "Immuni" App will consist of two parts, one dedicated to the actual contact tracing, via Bluetooth, and the other intended to preserve a kind of "clinical diary" in which the user can write down data from time to time. related to your health, such as the presence of symptoms compatible with the virus. In a nutshell, when the person who downloaded the app is positive for the virus, health workers provide him with an authorization code with which he can download his anonymous code to a ministerial server, if the app recognizes among the codes in the own memory a code of an infected person, displays the notification to the user.

The doubts arise from those who believe that, as far as it is stated, that all the data of the citizens who will use it will remain on a public server and after a while destroyed, the company that will manage Immuni could, despite what is said, retain the data on "other" servers or at least the whole thing could be penetrated by hackers or by foreign security services.

As we know, the right to the protection of personal data is not absolute and can be limited for the purpose of pursuing a pre-eminent general public interest objective or to protect the rights and freedoms of others, therefore the emergency for Coronavirus is also no exception. But it is understandable the weight of the story, to be aware that our data, even clinical, our movements, our contacts etc etc, even if after a certain time they are destroyed, they could still end up copying in some other data collection center , opens dangerous scenarios with, I believe, a very high percentage of our population at risk of intrusion.

So what do terms like privacy, confidentiality and secrecy mean even in these times!

First we start from the latter and from the origin of the word, from the ancient Latin "secretum" or Greek "kriptos". The secret is information that is not revealed or that should not or should not be revealed, because, if it were, it would cause harm to a community, to a State, to those who reveal it and sometimes to those who receive it. In this sense, we speak of state secrets, office secrets, banking secrets, military secrets, industrial secrets (a classic example is the secret kept in Atlanta with regard to the Coca Cola formula). These secrets can be violated on the orders of the investigating judiciary, for the opening of the state archives, for imprudence, for deliberate intent, and most often for money, treason and espionage.

Keeping a secret can be due to confidentiality and personal confidentiality that disappears with the death of its owner is also part of the confidentiality. Confidentiality does not only concern untrustworthy acts, because someone may legitimately wish not to make their illnesses public, (returning to the current emergency), their religious affiliations, political preferences, their sexual tastes and why not their passions . This is the right to privacy that is increasingly losing value in an increasingly mass media, information society, where the renunciation of confidentiality now takes the form of the most extreme exhibitionism. We think of the so much vaunted invasion of social networks that, like many things, from an excellent intuition they have often turned into a profound change in human habits, leading to fuel stupidity, hatred, resentment, anger, mystification of truth, up to the manipulation and abuse of social credulity. He puts himself in the virtual public square of everything and more by exposing the most intimate things, affirming senseless things, sometimes feeding various anarchies, also exposing the ingenuity of his children to a sick mob who is there ready to make himself dangerous.

They go on socially, foolishly, a lot of such personal information, to put their own safety and that of their loved ones at risk by many criminals who are also well present on social platforms, ready to steal even the most banal secrets of yours to draw personal benefits.

And in recent years we have also counted many deaths due to cyber bullying, suicides of girls and boys who can not stand the pressure after being victims of the pack, not only physically in school, in social life, but also now, on the web.

Once this relief valve was gossip. Also hateful but the classic gossip was done in the villages, in the concierge, at the tavern, at the bars, it was, forcing the analysis a little, an element of social cohesion because the gossip not infrequently instead of enjoying the misfortunes of the gossip felt or showed compassion for it. It itself worked if the victims were not present or did not know they were or saved their face by pretending not to know.

Today television has created formats in which anyone can become a famous victim by presenting himself to gossip about himself. We are witnessing a frightening trash where whole families present themselves for an offering, sometimes miserable, to dissect intimate problems, inheritance, worn-out relationships, or spouses who reproach themselves with betrayals or who mercilessly and mutually even reproached their sexual incapacities.

So, once the era of privacy has been undermined, the idea of ​​the secret has survived for millennia, which in order to be such, from antiquity, had to be mysterious first.

In fact, the philosopher Simmel recalls that men by nature are greedy for them and whoever is believed to possess secrets not yet revealed always acquires a form of power because who knows one day what he might reveal. It has always been a principle of the police and security and information services around the world, that the more you know and the more destabilizing and dangerous acts are prevented, the more you know the more you therefore have power or even show you know. The problem is not to fall into the temptation to disclose the secrets that you have, in this case I love to quote Gibran when he says "If you reveal your secrets to the wind, then you must not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees".

Always Simmel says that the typical feature of secret societies is invisibility, and if we reflect, secret associations have always been invisible. We think of the Carbonari or the Order of the Templars, which then many of them ended up on the guillotine or at the stake does not depend so much on whether the secret they kept was leaked, when on the fact that, if in the end the goal of an association is, for example, to organize a revolution, the secret ceases to be such when the revolution explodes. That is, there are secrets, such as that of an industrial group that wants to organize a takeover bid for the conquest of a share package, that cease to be secret when the climb is successful or when it fails blatantly.

Faced with a crisis that is rapidly and socially, socially, culturally and economically becoming a health crisis, I would like to put further reflection on an aspect of the concept of "secret" or industrial secrets. Albert Einstein said that "The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide one's sources".

In times of free competition and globalization of markets, the protection of secrecy

Industrial plays an increasingly strategic role for a company, together with the protection and defense of its innovations and new solutions, whether functional or aesthetic, as well as its distinctive signs.

From the production process of an object to its marketing, the series of non-patentable information is long, whether by choice or impossibility.

Yet this information, which can be technical or business, for those who hold it, represents a great economic value and for competitors an undoubted advantage, if only they could know it.

Each business holds secrets generated during business. Some enlightened

business owners are so aware of the importance of such secrets that they resort to

specific laws to obtain adequate protection. Most companies, however, realize their importance only when the secret has already been revealed. It is at this juncture that they realize that they have owned something with a value that deserves to be protected.

Considering the rapidity with which technology changes today, the protection of industrial secrecy, in some cases, represents the most attractive, interesting, efficient and easily accessible intellectual property right.

The legal definition of trade secret and business secret passes through the definition of the word "secret". Our legal system uses this term to indicate a document or information that must remain in the sphere of knowledge of the author.

In order for the information held by a company to be protected by law, it is

as well as constituting a corporate value, they must be kept secret.

In order for this information to be suitable for economic use and therefore worthy of legal protection, it must be:

  • technical, technological, financial, marketing, commercial or strategic information, in the form of reports, communications, including internal ones, studies, reports, lists, data, tables, cards, printouts and so on - both on paper and magnetic, optical or magneto-optical - as long as they are identifiable and suitable to constitute a patrimony of corporate utility. Identifying the know-how, that is the set of secret technical information, on a material support, is fundamental as it allows to verify if it possesses the secrecy and substantiality requirements that guarantee its protection.
  • secret, as they are difficult to access and sufficiently protected by those who are the legitimate owner. To demonstrate the adequate protection of information, in order to make it protectable and opposable, good faith or a simple quibble is not enough. Instead, a serious defense criterion and correct, demonstrable and documentable protection must be put in place: for example, a defense criterion provides for specific internal circulars, security procedures, note, confidentiality or security clauses, security contracts security, secretary, etc.

It is necessary that the organic set of such information, which is continuously implemented and adapted to the variation of the exchange factors and at the same time has its own economically important value for the company, as such, is secret and proper to the company .

In other words, even if the sequence of information, which together constitute a whole for the realization of a specific economic phase of the company's activity, is made up of particles of information known per se, if said sequence is in itself not known and considered factually secret by the company, this sequence is in itself worthy of protection. In fact, it is not necessary that every single information is "unknown" and "unknown", instead it is necessary that their organic whole is the result of an elaboration of the company.

Precisely in this way, in fact, it acquires an additional economic value compared to the individual elements that compose it. Think, for example, of a complex strategy for launching a product on the market: its individual elements are certainly known to operators in the sector but the whole may have been designed in such a way as to represent something new and original and, as such, a real treasure from the competitive point of view for the creator.

The secret is therefore the lever through which to protect one's own organizational and starting values ​​which find their strong point in the secret itself. This is why, in order to be protected, the know-how must not be accessible to everyone: if it spreads, it loses value.

Furthermore, thanks to the adoption of the protection measures, the logical presupposition of the abusiveness of the subtraction by a third party is created: in fact, nothing is abused except for something subjected to measures for its safeguard.

Here then is the need for fundamental rules to protect confidential information. Safeguard measures must be addressed both internally (towards employees or collaborators) and externally (towards third parties in general, such as, for example, suppliers, customers, partners, etc.).

In recent weeks there has been a lot of talk about European funds, the ECB's continued purchase of government bonds, the "notorious" MES. The countries are trying to find a meeting point but it is going in no particular order.

And in this scenario and on these relationships, the majority parties fight with each other and with the opposition, which in the meantime screams and sees new geopolitical arrangements between those who push not to damage the historical relationship with the USA and those who push very hard suspicion towards China and this also concerns the problem of 5G and the transfer of personal information and the increasing risk of theft also of industrial secrets.

As we know, the free market has brought our production system in general, and in the telecommunications // automotive / defense / security sectors in particular, to the acquisition or partnership between Italian and foreign (mostly European) companies.

It is a fact, it can be done and, I would add, most of the times, fortunately, given the long-standing absence of national investments, otherwise we would have dozens of medium and even large companies collapsing with the consequent loss of thousands of jobs of work. Therefore, we must confront this reality without however falling into pure sinister propaganda, be it political or social, and without inversely bowing our heads, highlighting the atavistic provincial spirit that unfortunately pervades the country forever.

But in this difficult time, when everything seems the opposite of everything, and that granite proclamations deflate in the inconsistency in a few hours, the goal to be achieved is to be simply very serious, recover values, work with ethics and working with a lot of attention so that intellectual property, the tangible and intangible product is also protected. There are all the tools to do it, from conventional and known ones to regulatory and legal ones, to counter the theft of secrets, whether industrial, military, scientific, but it is necessary precisely not to be superficial in the analyzes, evaluations and conclusions: deepen environments, interconnections, check "interested friends" cemented by common vices, in short, avoid that on these themes, I repeat, very delicate, very serious and vital for the safeguard and protection of our Republic and our national interests, there may be, few for luck, easiness and slovenliness that put the most strategic Italian industrial assets and the future of the Italian system and therefore of the collective good at risk.

What is secret, what is confidentiality, what is privacy in Coronavirus times