professor stefano rodotà, italy's privacy commissioner, is a very peculiar personality. he is a 70+ year old law professor from southern italy, with a political career that includes the vice presidency of the parliament and the chairmanship of the democratici di sinistra, italy's biggest left-wing party. and he's perceivably an absolutely brilliant person.

i found the interaction between him and larry lessig very interesting. when lessig, talking about copyright restrictions, said that "technology opens doors, law closes them", he replied: "no, my friend, you have to be more precise: technology opens doors, the capital closes them - and i hope i can still mention the capital without being accused of swearing".

but what i found absolutely surprising was his actual in-depth knowledge of technological mechanisms and of the most recent evolutions of technology - something you might not expect in such a person. so i was really astonished to hear him talk in public for almost ten minutes about google and the fact that european privacy authorities are very worried about their latest moves.

my italian readers might remember that, one year ago, i posted an article about risks to privacy posed by orkut, google's new social networking service, and why i thought it was a bad idea to join it. (i later joined the service, when i had already received over ten different invitations, so that in fact they already knew everything about my network of friends without me having registered yet.)

so i was quite happy to learn that the european privacy authorities have already held hearings with google executives about their services.

especially, rodotà reported that they were quite concerned about gmail and the fact that google is reading - though automatically - all e-mails that go through their system. so, he said, they made three questions to google's management.

they asked, "is it true that you scan all e-mails arriving to gmail users, including european citizens, for keywords?" - and the reply was affirmative.

then they asked, "is it true that you use this information to build profiles of your users that might include their social, cultural and political interests?" - and again the reply was yes.

finally they asked, "if asked under the patriot act and other laws, would you deliver these european citizens' profiles to the u.s. government agencies?" - and of course the reply was yes again.

rodotà added that they are even more worried now that google is going to digitize the books of many famous university libraries from around the world, because they don't know whether google will track which books - especially "subversive" ones - are being read by whom.

i don't know whether these concerns are excessive or reasonable. but even if we suppose that google is not spying people on purpose or with political intents, it seems clear that they are spying people, and that this information might eventually fall into the hands of the cia and other american agencies, without any information or due process or civil rights warranty for the citizens of europe.

and i am so happy that in the european governments and istitutions there are officers who still care about that.