IDP2016 (X). Céline Deswarte: Towards a future proof legal framework for digital privacy in Europe

Notes from the 12th Internet, Law and Politics Congress: Building a European digital space, organized by the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on 7-8 July 2016. More notes on this event: idp2016.

Keynote speech. Chairs: Pere Fabra

Céline Deswarte. Policy Officer, European Commission. Directorate General for Communication, Networks, Content and Technology.
Towards a future proof legal framework for digital privacy in Europe

EU legal framework for Digital Privacy: General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679/EU + ePrivacy Directive 2002/57/EC.

When you are surfing online you produce key information on time of connection, browsing history, location, etc. which can be retrieved. Telecom providers must anonymize or delete traffic and location data of their users and subscribers. When it is stored in hour own computer (e.g. cookies) the user must have given their prior consent after having been duly informed.

But is it consent strong enough? It is difficult to understand that consent is given “freely” if data subject has no genuine or free choice or unable to withdraw consent without detriment.

Protecting your personal data, when e.g. buying online. Companies must rely on a legal basis to process personal data, and respect principles of data processing.

On the specific issue of profiling, sharing personal data with a third party implies the right to be informed about it. Profiling is lawful unless it is equivalent to a decision with legal effects that is significantly harmful to the individual (e.g. one can lose one’s own job). Besides, there has to be a respect for the individual’s rights, e.g. the right to object at any time including profiling, and then data processing must stop.

Member states shall ensure the confidentiality of one’s electronic communications and related traffic data. So, it is not only about privacy in the sense of what you do, but also in the sense of what you say and to whom.

The big problem here is to whom applies all this regulation, as actors are many and different. So far, these principles only apply to telecom providers, while new market players like Voice IP or instant messaging, etc. do not need to respect this. In other words, social networking sites provide communication services but do not fall into the category of telecommunications providers.

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12th Internet, Law and Politics Conference (2016)

The challenge of being (professionally) connected. Proceedings of the VII EAFT Terminology Summit 2014: Social Media and Terminology work

Cover of "The challenge of being (professionally) connected"

The European Association for Terminology has just published the Proceedings of the VII EAFT Terminology Summit 2014: Social Media and Terminology work in which I opened with a keynote speech: The challenge of being (professionally) connected.

The topic dealt with the fact that being up-to-date with digital technologies (ICTs in general, social media in particular) is not a luxury but a must for people working in knowledge intensive environments or jobs. And, beyond the uptake of digital technologies, there is also the need to build networks around one-self — not necessarily digital ones, but surely enhanced and often enabled by digital technologies.

Please find below the slides and (subsequent) full text of the conference.

Abstract

Throughout the history of humankind, information has been trapped in a physical medium. Cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia, papyrus of ancient Egypt, modern books, newspapers. Even the most intangible information, the one locked inside the brains of people, usually implied having to coincide in time and space with the device that contained what we wanted to know. That’s why, for centuries, we have structured our information management around silos – archives, libraries, collections, gatherings of experts – and around ways to structure this information – catalogues, taxonomies, ontologies. The information lives in and out of the well, there’s the void. With the digitization of information, humankind achieves two milestones: firstly, to separate the content of the container; secondly, that the costs of the entire cycle of information management collapse and virtually anyone can audit, classify, store, create, and disseminate information. The dynamics of information are subverted. Information does not anymore live in a well: it is a river. And a wide and fast-flowing one. Are we still going to fetch water with a bucket and pulley, or should we be looking for new tools?

Slides

Dowloads

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Text of keynote:
Peña-López, I. (2016). “The challenge of being (professionally) connected”. In European Association for Terminology (Ed.), Proceedings of the VII EAFT Terminology Summit 2014: Social Media and Terminology work, 11-28. Barcelona 27-28 November 2014. Barcelona: EAFT.

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Slides (Prezi):
Peña-López, I. (2014). The challenge of being (professionally) connected. Keynote at the EAFT Terminology Summit, 27 November 2014. Barcelona: EAFT.

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Slides (Prezi as PDF):
Peña-López, I. (2014). The challenge of being (professionally) connected. Keynote at the EAFT Terminology Summit, 27 November 2014. Barcelona: EAFT.

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CDF2015 (I). Babah Tarawally: On the refugee crisis

Notes from the Connected Development Festival, organized by Partos, and held in The Hague, The Netherlands, on November 13, 2015.

Babah Tarawally

There is a difference between seeing and looking. When it comes to refugees, we should look, not only see. About seeing, the issue is how to help people to connect with the local community, to know the culture, to know the hidden and tacit things a community knows and does, so that their full potential can be realized.

Are we helping people? Yes. Are we empowering people? Maybe. Are people’s lives changing? That is the question. But not only the lives of the people we are “helping”, but everyone’s lives, including “ours”.

Both governments and NGOs have failed in making an impact in lesser developed countries, as the inflow of migrants demonstrates each and every day. We have to change global politics.

Development, innovation, is not only about copying and pasting practices around. It’s about giving hope.

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Connected Development Festival 2015 (2015)

IDP2015 (VII). E.J. Koops: Physical and Online Privacy: fundamental challenges for level frameworks to remain relevant

Notes from the 11th Internet, Law and Politics Congress: Regulating Smart Cities, organized by the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on 2-3 July 2015. More notes on this event: idp2015.

Physical and Online Privacy: fundamental challenges for level frameworks to remain relevant.
Prof. Dr. E.J. Koops. Professor of Regulation & Technology (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society)

Is it legal, or should it be allowed to:

  • Scan homes with termal equipped drones in search of hemp domestic plantations?
  • Take a snapshot of a stranger, google them, recognize their faces, peek at their social networking profiles and start a conversation with them on their preferences?
  • Track people inside shops with wifi-tracking, analyze their movements in the shop and thus place advertising on the counter?

Conceptual history of locating privacy:

  • The body (habeas corpus): physical privacy.
  • The home: physical privacy + private space.
  • The letter: physical privacy + closed ‘space’ between homes.
  • The telephone: ‘closed’ ‘space’ between homes.
  • Mobile phone: ‘closed’ ‘space’.
  • The computer: protecting data, not spaces.
  • The cloud: loss of location.

The home evaporates. There is a lot of information that now one can access without entering a home. And, usually, looking inside without entry is allowed. Same happens now with technology and digital data. The public space is increasingly becoming privacy-sensible: increased traceability, increased identifiability (face recognition, augmented reality)…

And with the trend to improve body functions through implants and prosthesis, the body itself sort of becomes a “public space” as its data (including brain stimuli) can be exported out of the body.

It is increasingly difficult to draw the technical distinction between traffic data and content of communications, particularly on an Internet context. The distinction, indeed, is becoming less relevant, as traffic data are also increasingly privacy-sensitive (location, profiling).

Problems/fallacies:

  • Data protection law cannot give individuals control over their data.
  • Too much confidence in the controller/regulator: the law is becoming too complex.
  • Regulating everything in one statutory law: impossibility for comprehensiveness.

What is privacy?

  • The right to be let alone.
  • Controlling information about oneself.
  • Freedom from judgement of others.
  • Freedom from unreasonable constraints.
  • Depends on the context.

More information

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11th Internet, Law and Politics Conference (2015)

New democratic movements (II). New technologies, social networks, and democracy

Notes from the Workshop on New democratic movements, civic culture and the transformations of democracy, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, on June 18th and 19th, 2015. More notes on this event: new_democratic_movements.

New technologies, social networks, and democracy
Introduced by David Karpf

We are living in a period of deep deep inequality of democratic exercise. Yes, one man has one vote, but not everyone has the same means to influence politics.

If you build it… they will not come. It is extremely difficult to make people participate. New media do not create our preferences, but just help in revealing our preferences. This is after an (institutional) effort to make politics unattractive to people, that they should not participate in politics. So, it’s not enough building things for participation, but we need to engage people.

Discussion

Jane Mansbridge: what if everyone — especially parties and politicians — use the same tools as activists?

Ismael Peña-López: it’s the ethos behind that changes the landscape. Parties have been using the Internet and doing “politics 2.0”, which is but traditional politics with a digital support. While citizens are doing “technopolitics”, which is something brand new, decentralized, distributed.

Mayo Fuster: one of he difference between Occupy Wall Street and the 15M Spanish Indignados is the ability to create confluences of movements. In Spain, there has been some degree of success when it comes to come together, join forces, including connections with the free culture and the free software movement. This has been very successful in Spain while in the US fragmentation has stood.

Ismael Peña-López: it is true that power is still unevenly distributed, but the tools are more and more evenly distributed. It may be only a matter of time that things change and become more balanced. On the issue of participation, it is true that people do not want to participate (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002), but also that it is provided that institutions work (Font et al., 2012). If they do not work, people will participate to fix them.

Marianne Maeckeberg: there has been a deep difference between the Spanish Indignados movement and Occupy Wall Street. While the former tried to tame technology so that it did what they wanted to sere their purposes of achieving a higher level of democracy quality, OWS was obsessed with “having the spotlight back”, of appearing on the news. And when media came back not, they were disappointed. In the meanwhile, the Indignados organized and even got to the local and regional governments.

Can Kurban: information is the core of politics, of democracy, of decision-making. And it still is important if some people get more informed, even if not more people get more informed. This can be crucial to spread the information.

Q: what happens if people do not want to be bothered with political information? how do we engage them?

Ismael Peña-López: we begin to have evidence that the “Daily Me” is ceasing to be true (if it ever was) and that people that use the Internet and especially social networking sites are more exposed to political information even if they are not looking for it. This is due to the fact that political content is easily created and spread on the Net, and it comes to you through people you trust.

Q: what was the role of youth unemployment in the success of the 15M Spanish Indignados movement?

Mariona Ferrer: of course it had a major role. But not only. Also the quality of the employments of the most qualified people, the precarious employment of a big majority, the previous movements for free culture, etc.

José Luís Martí: what was the role of technologies?

David Karpf: I don’t think technologies made the institutions irrelevant. But they did make them more vulnerable. And this provides new opportunities for new activism.

José Luís Martí: you could o a lot of stuff to influence politics in the past, but now you can much more and much easier.

Mayo Fuster: the use of technology is becoming organic. It’s not about a quantitative change — more people using these tools — but a qualitative one, with increasingly people using in a different way these tools and for different purposes and thus changing the system, probably forever. As Benkler said, these tools are making it possible to reduce the costs of transaction and, thus, change behaviours and organizations. And this is changing everything. And these changes are not only more democratic, but also more efficient.

Adolfo Estalella: these movements, and especially coders, are challenging the way we understand code itself and legal and social code in general, challenging how we understand politics, etc.

Ismael Peña-López: more than the profile of who used the technology, it is more relevant to look whom the technology reached. Or, even better, whom benefited from the use (maybe by others) of the technology for political or civic purposes. And it did reach many people, and many disconnected from the net, or from political networks. Indeed, this is the point of interest in the connections that technology brought: not only the coordination of synchronous action, but sharing information and protocols so that they could be applied in place, and free from the network.

Jane Mansbridge: the collective intelligence is just that, gathering scattered information from remote corners and putting it together for anyone to make use of it.

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New democratic movements (2015)

New democratic movements (I). Transformations of democracy. Deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, digital democracy

Notes from the Workshop on New democratic movements, civic culture and the transformations of democracy, organized by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, on June 18th and 19th, 2015. More notes on this event: new_democratic_movements.

Transformations of democracy. Deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, digital democracy
Introduced by Jane Mansbridge

Trust in government has worsened in most places, plummeting towards illegitimacy.

We need more and more of public goods, goods that are freely available for everyone once they are created: roads, a stable climate, etc. And we create them by coercion, legitimate coercion through which we force ourselves to create such public goods. And this only happens through deliberation.

And to be more deliberative you have to be more reflective. But there has not been a requirement for more deliberation.

Habermasian standards for good deliberation should be, if not challenged, at least revised.

Respect and absence of power, for instance, are very likely still unchallenged nowadays. But reasons might be. Deliberation, yes, is about reason, leaving aside emotional considerations. But this does not mean that there are no emotional reasons behind some issues.

Aim at consensus, on the other hand, may still apply. But it has usually left aside the conflicts between different interests. And clarifying interests when interests conflict may help in subsequent searches for consensus.

Equal power in the group and consensus in the group are two issues that we have been looking forward as ideals in any deliberation process. Equality, openness and consensus as main pieces to do better democracy together. But these ideals are more contextual that we often think of. Equal power, for instance, is a highly contextual and, more important even, contingent principle. Circumstances change and we have to take that into account.

Discussion

Mayo Fuster: trust has left institutions and has found networks as a way to channel it. So, the decrease of trust in institutions has been corresponded by higher trust in P2P and decentralized ways of decision-making.

Mariona Ferrer: Deliberation was also about understanding the complexity of the issues at stake, and being empowered to understand them and to face them.

Jane Mansbridge: it depends on the purpose, deliberation may deliver better or not. If the purpose, the mission, is to understand, then deliberation and consensus are just great. If the goal of deliberation is to make a decision, things may be a little bit more complex.

David Karpf: participating in social movements is partly about one’s own transformation: by participating, one transforms onesef. Besides, there’s the goal of social transformation. And sometimes there is a trade-off between the personal and the social transformation.

Adolfo Estalella: local assemblies usually had their own personal, local, micro goals, very specific, and very explicit on the other hand. E.g. stopping evictions, helping migrants to integrate, etc. But most assemblies had not specific goals headed towards specific decisions, but the goal was to be itself, to be a “political topos”, to establish a political space.

Ismael Peña-López: if the goals were making decisions, yes, the goals may not have been very clear in past social movements. But if the goal was to draw a comperehensive diagnosis of the problems felt by the citizens, the goals were clear and the movements succeeded not only in the diagnosis, but in putting those problems in the pubic agenda. The problem is that governments did not answer accordingly, they did not take the gauntlet, and threw it back to the movements asking for “concrete proposals”, which the movements did not succeed at making.

Q: Why are we so much thrilled now about consensus when, in the past, we had enough with some deliberative majoritarian processes.

José Luís Martí: we should not take consensus as unanimity. Consensus is about the process, and it can lead indeed to voting, and to the rule of the majority. But the process of how things are discussed, the concurrence of actors, the comparison of different options, that is the nature of deliberation and consensus.

Jane Mansbridge: the has been a raise in the feeling of autonomy. This raise in the feeling, the need for autonomy is a powerful driver towards consensus and partly against unanimity, or the majority rule.

Marianne Maeckelbergh: a good reason for consensus beating majoritarian processes is that they take into consideration the voice of the minorities. And even if the result may not be the minority’s will, it is taken into account. With simple majoritarian voting, this is not so.

Jane Mansbridge: Many people see these movements and practices as prefigurative, as a “model for tomorrow”. But this is a mistake: this is an actual practice, a today’s practice, rooted in the nature of our times.

Ismael Peña-López: two more answers on why now we care about consensus and not the traditional majoritarian processes. First, because as the motto We are the 99% says, the problem is that most governments are not seen as representing the majority. Second, because “now we can”. Meaning: the costs of participating in democracy have lowered down dramatically due to technology. So, maybe, majoritarian processes were just good for the context given, they were optimal for the resources (time, money) given for participation. But now the citizen can be an active actor in democracy, at ridiculous costs. And the citizen is claiming that, now that they can participate, they want to.

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New democratic movements (2015)