Seminar Series | Fundamental Rights and Surveillance
Dal 25.11.2025 al 15.12.2025
Scientific coordinator: Daniele Ruggiu, University of Padova.
The Seminar Series within the Course of Fundamental rights and surveillance at MA EGoS begins on 25 November 2025.
On 25 November 2025 from 10:30 to 12:30 Prof.ssa Mariavittoria Catanzariti (Università di Padova) will present in Aula A (Ca' Dottori) and on Zoom her book titled Territoriality, Data, and Sovereignty.
Territoriality has historically played the role of making jurisdiction certain or making sovereign powers qualitatively equal. Looking at the enormous and pervasive phenomenon of massive data flows gives the account of new actors, new forms of power, and new creative responses. When physical boundaries - such as those of a territory or a body, everything that requires being located within a visible frame - are no longer capable of pursuing traditional tasks to which they have been allegedly addressed - for example, enabling sovereign powers to perform within material limits - then it is time to reflect upon the state of the art of traditional legal categories explore how they may interact with the digital transformation and what can be the steps forward.
On 26 November 2025 from 10:30 to 12:30, the seminar by Prof. Guido Gorgoni (University of Padova), titled Identity and digital citizenship, will be held on line, via Zoom.
As embodied subjects of experience in the physical world, we inhabit cyberspace as «dividuals» composed of fragmented and dispersed data as a result of the operations performed by algorithms on (big) data (matching, profiling etc.). Within the «algorithmic society», that is «a society organized around social and economic decision-making by algorithms, robots, and Al agents, who not only make the decisions but also, in some cases, carry them out» (Balkin 2017) the intersubjective process of identity building is replaced by a algorithmic processes so that «there is no single, static sense of us but rather an untold number of competing, modulating interpretations of data that make up who we are» (Cheney-Lippold 2017: 35). This alters the fundamental ethical and political anthropology of our times: «when individuals are replaced by dividuals, the categories of identity that we normally think of as politically owned by us, like gender, race, and citizenship [...] become nonlinearly connected to an endless array of algorithmic meaning, like web use and behavior data» (Cheney-Lippold 2017: 42).
On 15 December 2025 from 10:30 to 12:30 the seminar Meta’s Processing of EU Personal Data for AI Training by Dr. Olivia Anne Carmichael and Dr. Michele De Zen (Data protection Specialist, of the Gruppo Cassa Centrale) will be held in Aula A (Ca' Dottori) and on line.
Olivia Carmicheal and Michele De Zen critically examine Meta Platforms’ 2024 proposal to use the personal data of European users to train its generative AI systems, assessing its compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. They hold that LLM-based profiling represents a more pervasive and less visible form of automated processing, capable of generating highly personalized and potentially manipulative outputs, thereby magnifying democratic and ethical risks. The findings suggest that while the GDPR theoretically offers robust safeguards, dominant platforms such as Meta can push legal boundaries through broad interpretations of necessity, delayed compliance, and reliance on opt-out regimes.
