Os efeitos da cidade digital: o direito à privacidade e à liberdade de informação

Abstract

The present work analyzes the formation of the Digital City within social rela-tions, focusing on the effects of the warranty of the right to privacy for users of the virtual environment, namely, websites and social networks. This study was motivated by the juridical effects, both of the leakage of personal information of the Internet users, and of the treatment of data collected by its service providers. The virtual communities which are formed by means of cyberspace surpass the need for locality and sociability. Since they generate social isolation and the abandonment of face-to-face interactions in real environments, they help creating a sociability pattern based on individualism. In this work, the new interaction patterns originated in this new format of informational collectivity and its effects concerning laws will be analyzed. More specifically, this study presents a number of hypotheses of civil liability of the Internet service providers in view of illicit acts by other parties, as well as alternatives, as far as a privacy tutelage system regarding data protection is concerned, in view of injury in the informational environment. The mapping of possible situations of civil liability charging was conducted by means of analysis, both of jurisprudence and of the prevailing doctrine, and it highlighted the factual aspects of the case which characterize its formatting. The model under study is imposed upon a multiplicity of individuals, thus creating a perfect incarceration by means of the exertion of biopower. The roles of the Internet surfers within informational society are reinforced by a consumerist culture and by the society of spectacle, which turns the individual into goods, once it researches the profiles of the Internet-connected users, and thus categorizes them as consumers. In this sense, this work discusses the risks of a society of vigilance, which functions as a product in market relations and makes it possible disposing freely of a growing number of information. Such constant vigilance invades all environments and, regardless of chronological time, monitors our behavior by means of an implacable memory, making our past eternally visible as well as generating constraining situations which astound us.