From Group Privacy to Collective Privacy: Towards a New Dimension of Privacy and Data Protection in the Big Data Era

This chapter focuses on big data analytics and, in this context, investigates the opportunity to define informational privacy and data protection as collective rights. From this perspective, privacy and data protection are not considered as referring to a given individual, but as common to the individuals that are grouped into various categories by data gatherers. The peculiar nature of the group generated by big data analytics requires an approach that cannot be exclusively based on individual rights. The new scale of data collection entails the recognition of another layer, represented by groups’ need for the safeguard of their collective privacy and data protection rights. This dimension needs a specific regulatory framework, which should be mainly focused on the legal representation of these collective interests, on the provision of a mandatory multiple-impact assessment of the use of big data analytics and on the role played by data protection authorities.