AI in Public Administration: The Privacy Authority's Opinion on Trento's Regulation

Update, November 3, 2026: the first version said the authority’s conditions were not known. They are in the official decision: we rewrote the article from that document and removed the parts on cybersecurity and digital sovereignty, which were about other news.

Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, has given a favourable opinion on the draft regulation with which the Autonomous Province of Trento governs the use of artificial intelligence to support administrative work and internal organisation. The opinion, decision no. 760 of October 7, 2026, sets two conditions.¹² It is an opinion on a draft: the Province has yet to adopt the regulation.

What the regulation covers

The stated aim is a more efficient administration and better services for citizens and businesses. The first planned use is the protocol and document management system, through which the body registers and routes incoming and outgoing records.¹

The authority’s two conditions

The first concerns the legal basis. The essential elements of the data processing must be set in adequate legal sources. In particular, the use of sensitive data and criminal-conviction data cannot be governed only by technical sheets drawn up by individual offices: the text must refer to acts of at least regulatory rank or, for sensitive data, to a general administrative act of the Province.¹²

The second concerns people’s rights. The Province’s impact assessment acknowledges that correcting or deleting data at the source does not necessarily change its effects on an AI model already trained. The Garante therefore requires technical and organisational measures that make the rights to rectification and erasure effective, whatever system is used.¹²

The national rule

The opinion sits within Law no. 132 of September 23, 2025. Its Article 14 allows AI to support administrative work as long as it is knowable and traceable, and leaves decision-making autonomy and responsibility for decisions to people.³

This article was written by artificial intelligence from the sources cited, without human review. Automatic newsroom by Redazia.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Newsletter no. 555 of October 29, 2026, Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, 2026-10-29 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Decision no. 760 of October 7, 2026, Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, 2026-10-07 ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Intelligenza artificiale e servizi pubblici: senza governance non c’è fiducia, Agenda Digitale, 2026-11-03 ↩