A group of hackers breached the booking systems of several upscale Italian hotels, stealing tens of thousands of high‑resolution scans of guests’ passports, IDs, and other check‑in documents. The data has appeared on the darknet, with listings offering around 70,000 documents for sale at prices from €800 to €10,000. The breaches began around June and hit luxury hotels in Venice, Trieste, and Capri, with a possible hit on a Mallorca hotel as well. One property, Ca’ dei Conti in Venice, is said to have about 38,000 documents stolen. The Italian Digital Agency notes that the darknet listings are now presented in a pixelated form.

From a Hayekian angle, this is a stark reminder that centralized attempts to plan and control every security risk fail because knowledge about danger is dispersed, local, and evolving. No regulator or bureaucrat can foresee all vulnerabilities across dozens of hotel IT systems scattered across regions and markets. The only reliable protection comes from the spontaneous order grounded in property rights, voluntary contracts, and competitive pressures. If guests owned their data and hotels competed on trustworthy handling of that data, security would become a competitive differentiator, not a box checked for compliance. The moment policy tries to micromanage security, it distorts incentives, freezes innovation, and creates compliance theater that pretends to protect privacy while inflating costs and concentrating control.

Nozick’s frame sharpens the issue: individuals own themselves and their chosen property, including personal information, and the responsibility to protect that property lies with the agents who control or transact it. When a hotel’s data practices betray guests—through lax protections, shared databases, or opaque vendor contracts—the resulting harm is a violation of rights that must be addressed through private enforcement, liability, and voluntary redress, not through expansive state mandates. A minimal state’s job is to defend rights, but even that defense should yield to private negotiation and market remedies whenever possible. If a hotel’s breach misallocates, disrespects, or steals personal data, the rightful remedy is contract-based accountability, insurance market signals, and reputational consequence—not further coercive regulation that raises the cost of doing business while offering no guarantee of real security.

Rand would insist that this demonstrates the moral and economic superiority of a system that respects individual rights and rejects collectivist or statist overreach. Privacy is an aspect of rational self‑interest and individual sovereignty; any system that treats personal data as a fungible bearer of weather to be blown by regulation or forced aggregation undermines the moral purpose of productive, voluntary exchange. The free market, through competitive providers of data protection, transparent disclosure, and robust liability for breaches, offers the only principled route to real security. When guests can choose hotels based on demonstrated privacy protections, and hotels face clear consequences for lax security, innovation in encryption, data minimization, and secure storage accelerates. Government mandates, licensing schemes, or data-retention edicts tend to create perverse incentives, compliance costs, and a false sense of security while preserving the coercive scaffolding of the state.

In practice, the libertarian diagnosis is simple: reduce the coercive footprint of governance over data, empower private rights and voluntary protections, and let market competition enforce standards. Strengthen contracts that limit data collection to what is strictly necessary, require explicit opt-in for any sharing beyond the service, and impose clear, enforceable liability for breaches. Support private data‑security auditors, insurers, and reputational mechanisms that reward robust protections and punish negligence. Let consumers vote with their feet and wallets—exit poorly protected establishments and reward those that prove trustworthy. The systemic remedy is not more state control, but more liberty: fewer compelled data collections, stronger private property rights in personal information, and accountability enforced through private rights and market discipline, not through heavier government intervention.