Naam Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society email

1. Naam Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society email

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

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.

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?

5. 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)

6. 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.

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.).

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??

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.