In all cases, it remains to be debated whether the interests of agents are best expressed in the language of a claimed right to identity.1

Introduction

Forgotten and neglected for several decades by both the jurisprudence and the legal doctrine, the right to personal identity has been the target of a recent revival movement.2 The legal ‘revitalization’ of the right to identity is, to a very large extent, connected with the revolutionary changes brought by recent technological developments,3 namely with the so-called information revolution4 and the digitization of the human person.5 These technological progresses have equipped people with a new set of tools through which to express and represent their identities, rendering the latter increasingly fluid and dynamic. Further to the novel and fascinating ways through which identities can be constructed and communicated, these technologies also aggravate the dangers threatening identity, intensifying the ways through which a person’s identity can be detected, distorted, deleted,

1 Roger Brownsword, ‘Friends, Romans, and Countrymen: Is There a Universal Right to Identity?’ Law, Innovation and Technology 1, no. 2 (2009): 226.