A Fragile Right. The Value of Civil Law Categories and New Forms of Protection in Algorithmic Data Processing under the GDPR.

Legal systems of the world address the issue of data protection by adopting different levels of intervention, on the basis of their cultural traditions. In Europe, data processing is subject to strict regulation, the main aim of which is to protect individuals whose data has been processed, as can be seen also with regard to the new Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR). As a consequence of this «protective» approach, the right to data protection is regarded as a fundamental right, which, according to the legal tradition of continental Europe, usually implies data inalienability and the tendency to consider it mainly in its individual dimension. Nevertheless, the new challenges and threats posed by the Data Revolution may require greater flexibility, which can be achieved by adopting new approaches of a preventive, collective and relational nature, should the remedies provided for by the legal tradition prove ineffective. According to this paper all these approaches are already set down in the GDPR, but should be further enhanced and developed with the assistance of legal scholarship in order to ensure effective protection of this right.