The Myth of Odin’s Eye: Privacy vs. Knowledge

Knowledge has always represented a sort of human unrealizable dream and omniscience, that means the complete and unlimited knowledge, is considered by most of the cultures as a divine characteristic. To know means to have the power: in human history – and in recent philosophical reflections – it is a full stop! But what are we willing to give to get access to knowledge? Myths and stories on knowledge research tell of long trips and of supreme sacrifices. In the portrayals of Odin, the father of the gods in the Scandinavian tradition, he is often represented with a single eye. One of the several changing Nordic legends tells that, in order to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, the god sacrificed his eye to Mimir, the Mimirsbrønd’s keeper, the magic fountain of wisdom placed on Yggrdrasil’s roots. Since then, the divine eye is situated in the icy water of the fountain, as the price paid to acquire the eyes of the sage and to discern the essence of things, behind the appearance. This is the price paid by Odin. But what are we willing to pay? Or rather: are we really aware of the cost of our access to knowledge, particularly in the digital context and despite the outward gratuitousness of the provided service? I will try to give an answer to these questions in the following pages. In the first part I will focus on the issues linked to utilization of Digital Rights Management systems (DRM), suited to regulate the fruition of intellectual works protected by intellectual property rules, with specific reference to users’ privacy in its different dimensions; then, always from a privacy oriented point of view, I will outline the problematic aspects that open access to knowledge presents; I will analyze a paradigmatic example of free of charge service that poses monstrous risks from the point of view of users profiling activity. At the end, in order to pull the strings of the matter together and to take back the cues offered by Odin’s saga, I will develop some final reflections on the relationship between privacy and knowledge in the digital context.