“The Italian Court goes beyond the assumption that personal data as the expression of personality rights, subject to specific and not renounceable forms of protection cannot be treated at the same time as an economic asset when they are collected and processed by an organization to extract economic value.
In such a context, if the provision of personal data is required to allow the access to a service, it cannot be presented as free because the personal data of the user has an economic value for the service provider and, as a consequence, has to be considered as the price of the service.
According to the court, the service provider should have made the consumers aware that the information that could be extracted from such personal data would have been exploited for commercial purposes that go beyond the strict needs to allow the use of the social network.”
The economic exploitation of personal data in privacy and consumer laws by Massimimiliano Pappalardo on The Privacy Advisor (IAPP)
