ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to identify the main challenges and risks that these rights have to face within a global digital environment and, in the meantime, highlight the opportunities that human rights (HRs) protection could receive from digital technologies, if they are properly deployed. It will consider as case-studies some significant 'digital events' of the web.2.0 era, namely the recent developments in the functionality of social networking sites (SNS), e.g. Face book's default privacy settings and the launch of its new facial recognition system: these examples will be used as starting points for a wider discussion on the evolution of digital rights and in particular of data protection rights.