Using a complex system analysis, the authors investigate the right to information in the context of digitalization. The object of the study is social relations concerning the search, acquisition, transfer, production and distribution of digital information in the conditions of digitalization of the economy. The study’s subject includes Ukraine’s legal norms, regulatory provisions of international treaties and legal acts of the European Union, and theoretical scientific works on legal regulation of digital information. The research uses a dialectical, interpretive, historical-legal, formal-legal, comparative-legal, and systemic- structural method. It is indicated that the right to access information includes and ensures the realization of a set of rights that allow searching, receiving, transferring, producing and distributing digital information in information systems through existing rules and requirements of current legislation. The expansion of production, use, processing, storage, retrieval and transmission in digital form has influenced the further development of the right to information. In the case of digitalization, the right to information acquires a private-public expression, which is connected with the satisfaction of individual needs and the realization of national interests. Public interests are protected by the mechanisms of information bans and restrictions depending on the content of the information. It is noted that the digital form of information directly affects the change in the essence of individual legal relations and institutions in information law and other branches of law. Digitalization is not a systemic, sequential or structurally homogeneous phenomenon but provides significant sectoral coverage. The possibilities of free search, acquisition, transmission, production and distribution of information determined not only the emergence of remote communication but also the development of the informational component of the rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen for their implementation in a virtual environment, which made it possible to virtualize social processes. Further study of the right to information in the conditions of digitalization is connected with the study of the influence of the Internet on access to information.
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