Abstract
Italians fall behind many other western countries on computer access and digital knowledge, so how does that affect the public’s willingness to embrace new government initiatives?
For many, these words were a mystery and had little to do with their lives.
Eurostat’s 2019 Digital Economy and Society Index – which tracks the evolution of EU member states in digital competitiveness – ranked Italy fifth from last across the EU member countries, ahead of Bulgaria and Romania, noting that “three out of 10 people are not regular internet users yet, and more than half of the population still lack basic digital skills”.
In 2019, a third of Italian families did not own a computer, laptop or tablet – and this number is higher in the poorer south.
The problem became obvious when Italy enforced the first lockdown in the west, and teachers and students had to pivot to distance-learning. Eloisa Di Rocco, a researcher with the Fondazione Reggio Children, wrote that, even in the wealthier north, many children had access only to smartphones. Many had to use friends’ and colleagues’ printers to print out assignments. And while most Italians would like to delete their data online, according to cybersecurity and anti-virus provider Kaspersky, about half of the population has no idea how to do it.
Digital literacy is a population’s ability to live with, work with and think critically about digital resources. It means being able not only to read and do basic stuff online but also to understand how the online world is different from the non-digital one – for example, understanding how tracking and apps work.
Without allowing public scrutiny in parliament or through a press conference, the Italian government began developing a contact tracing app under the enticing name of Immuni.
Many Italians seem undeterred by the fuzzy details around how much Immuni would track them, and the dangers for their privacy. A survey by consumer association Altroconsumo found that, in April, two-thirds of Italians were eager to download the app. About half of respondents said they would do so no matter what, even if the app collected personal data without anonymising it.
There is probably more than one reason why privacy seems less important than health for Italians – including the fact that the country had faced one of the world’s most severe out-breaks and the west’s longest lockdown.
But experts believe there are also cultural reasons behind it.
“The concept of the importance of privacy is popular among Italians,” said Arturo Di Corinto, a prominent journalist specialising in digital rights. “But,” he conceded, “people don’t really know what it’s about.”
In a country where a third of households don’t own a tablet, laptop or a computer, a small group of people congregate on the street in Tuscany
CREDIT: Anna Rebecka Lindberg/Picfair
Unlike in other European countries, Italy lacks a thriving environment of digital rights NGOs and foundations that could educate the public, spread awareness about new technology and influence political decisions, Stefania Milan, an Italian associate professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam, says.
She mentions the Dutch NGO Bits of Freedom as an example of how a vibrant third-sector organisation could help raise awareness about digital rights. Every year, Bits of Freedom organises a Big Brother Award – an event that brings to light the most privacy-threatening practices by “celebrating” the government and private organisations with the worst record.
These are some of the reasons why, according to Di Corinto, there is a lot of “ignorance”.
“Unfortunately, these are advanced debates of people who study,” he said. “People are picking up tomatoes for €3 ($3.3) an hour, and they don’t care about privacy all that much, because there isn’t a culture of rights.”
This makes technical conversations more difficult.
“Low digital literacy doesn’t favour the introduction of [more harmful] privacy laws, but it’s an ecosystem that allows those with an interest to run extremely harmful initiatives without any public outrage,” said Raffaele Angius, a tech journalist who often writes for Wired Italia and La Stampa.
In other words, if many people do not own computers or they struggle to understand how tracking works, they are less able to understand how technology violates their privacy.
And according to Stefania Milan, digital literacy and skills act like an “antibody”, better equipping people to push back against efforts to take away their privacy rights.
In Germany, where some 70% of the population has at least basic digital skills, and where the debate about technology and privacy has been prominent for years, the public played a key role in the contact tracing debate.
When health minister Jens Spahn unveiled plans for a centralised app that would track the population’s position through their phones’ GPS systems, he faced “massive criticism” from society, said Daniel Leisegang, a political scientist and editor at the German political magazine Blätter.
Spahn was forced to backtrack and introduced plans for a different, more privacy-conscious app, called Decentralised Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing, or DP3T.
“This debate about the privacy of the German citizens was enormously important,” said Leisegang. “For years, civil rights movements have been fighting against digitisation undermining everybody’s privacy.”
Italian authorities, it seems, reached similar conclusions – demanding that Immuni was not compulsory and was to be based on a decentralised approach to data storage, but the public participated much less in the debate. When it did, this participation left a lot to be desired.
On 12 April, Roberto Burioni, one of Italy’s most prominent virologists and science communicators and a leader in the public debate about the coronavirus pandemic, called those who worried that the state was overreaching “babbei” (“suckers”) on Twitter.
He added: “I’m sorry, but between health and privacy there is a well-defined priority that we need to affirm very clearly,” suggesting that privacy would have to give way to fight the virus. “It’s not the case at all,” said Raffaele
Angius. “The only really effective tracking technologies are also perfectly able to combine privacy and health.”
Much of the media also seemed lost, said Raffaele Barberio, the president of Privacy Italia, an organisation aiming to raise awareness about the protection of personal data.
“The Italian press filled newspaper pages because talking about technology is cool,” he said. “But most journalists don’t understand very much about these things, either.”
While a limited number of tech journalists and experts wrote in depth about the issue, many generalist newspapers with scarce resources and fast turnarounds “talked about it very much, but often chaotically”.
For example, newspapers devoted dozens of articles to the distinction between “centralised” and “decentralised” approaches to data storage. But they didn’t go into issues readers would have cared more about, such as who gets to see their data, how much their country has to rely on Silicon Valley infrastructure, or the dangers of using Bluetooth.
The worst news is that if governments become more prone to overreaching in the post-pandemic world it might take years for countries in the same position to create the necessary digital “antibodies”.
“What is important is that these things are discussed over time, that schools could educate on these issues and that there is a widespread awareness,” said Milan.
Di Corinto agrees. “The culture of privacy is slow, long and difficult work,” he said. “Exactly like the exercise of democracy.”