Acceso usuarios
Riccardo M. Colangelo
This essay springs from a recognition of the various uses of the ‘virtual’. This is fundamental to understanding that the Net is not a virtual world like Second Life. Indeed, many authors emphasize the risks of Internet addiction, and ‘misuse’ of the Net may result in the commission of crimes. Among the legal risks, those related to the ‘electronic body’ are especially significant, and the situation is still evolving. The doctrinal notion of an ‘electronic body’, a non-physical corpus of information, differs from that of a ‘virtual body’. An ‘electronic body’ also includes images, such as those of bodies exposed – as user-generated content – in inactive profiles. This kind of image is very interesting from a legal perspective. In particular, images – digital representation of real bodies – published in indexed web pages may create many problems surrounding ‘personal identity’, which is protected by the Italian Constitution. In order to minimize these problems, the images, although lawfully published, may be removed from the search engine results through enforcement of the right to be forgotten. Google and Microsoft provide online ‘modules’ to support this, but the notion of the right to be forgotten on the Net is different from the traditional one. The images published in inactive profiles – old and new alike – may not be easily deindexed, despite the use of the ‘modules’, which offer the simplest way to exercise the right to be forgotten on the Net.
