NaamTilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society

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November 2007 2

Ambient Intelligence: Challenges for Regulatory Perspectives

Prof. Corien Prins

Center for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT)

www.uvt.nl/tilt

Tilburg University

Enschede, 27 November 2007

November 2007 3

What Challenges do we face?

• Privacy protection: what data do I ‘transmit’, who receives these data, who uses them and for what purposes?

• Identity and dimensions of identity: ambient intelligence results in categories, (stereo) types of people

• Autonomy and freedom: can we still say “NO” (isn’t it all in the public interest?)

• Ownership: who owns all this data?

• Our world and our intelligent surroundings as one big database.

November 2007 4

From Psysical Products to Immaterial Data

• Ambient intelligence– it is all about personal data, information and

knowledge

• Personal data, information and knowledge– it is all about power and money

• Power and Money– in the end our challenge is balancing interests

• Balancing interests– What instruments can best be used?

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However:

• Various developments testify to the growing influence of property thinking in the human rights domain:

– property in personality (name, appearance, voice, etc.);– property in human body parts– Property in personal data.

• Data about individuals nowadays have become a key commercial asset (e.g. data in biobanks; Google/YouTube

• Developments in intellectual property

• Extend property interests to personal data of individuals (why not grant individuals same rights in their name as companies/why not recognise the property right of companies);

• Individuals must be able to negotiate and bargain over the use of their data and they need something in return (return benefits)

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However:

• Property rights perspective does not fit the human rights perspective (human right is a right of non-interference, not a right of positive entitlement);

• More than just a commodity (dignity, social value of privacy): ambient intelligence also requires us to think about autonomy.

• Privacy is linked to constituting and maintaining a person’s personal integrity. Thus, it is a non-commodifiable right

• Ambient intelligence is often also about groups of people, not just individual data.

November 2007 7

Personal Data? Or is it all about Identities?

• Individual data versus combined data (linking databases);

• Data are not just data (not one uniform category)

• Ambient intelligence; RFID, personalized services require use to focus not so much on the individual data, but on the effects of the use of present-day technologies and the use of combined data;

• Thus: focus on identities (types of persons; types of citizens/types of consumers/types of healthy/unhealthy people, type of ethnic origin, etc.).

November 2007 8

Shifting in Our Attention

• Shift our attention from individual sets of personal data toward the statistical models, profiles and the algorithms with which individuals are assigned to a certain group or ‘identity’;

• Data protection mechanisms must be structured along lines of control and visibility.

• Data protection mechanisms must be structured along lines of transparency and trust

• … and maybe other benefits??

November 2007 9

Ambient Intelligence: What We Need

• We need to know and understand how social and economic identities are constructed, influenced and used;

• We need instruments to know and to control how our ‘lives’ are ‘created’ and influenced;

• We need other ‘personal data’ protection standards

• Our identity is more that an administrative identity (ipse identity – idem identity)

• We do need instruments to protect our autonomy and individual identity.