Privacy and internet governance

Author(s)

Nikolaus Forgó

Abstract

Many of the game-changing innovations the Internet brought and continues to bring to all of our daily professional and private lifes come with privacy-related costs. The more day-to-day activities are based on the Internet, the more personal data are generated, collected, stored and used. Big Data, Internet of Things, cyber-physical-systems and similar trends will be based on even more personal information all of us use and produce constantly.

Three major points are to be noted here: First, there is no common European or even worldwide agreement whether and in how far these collections need to be limited. There is, though, no common privacy law âĂŞ neither in Europe nore worldwide. Second, laws that do exist constantly fail in steering the developments. Technology innovations come so fast, are so disruptive and so market-demand driven, that an ex-post control by law and courts constantly comes late and/or is circumvented and/or ignored. Third, lack of consensus and lack of steering lead to huge data accumulations and market monopolies built up very quickly and held by very few companies working on a global level with data driven business models. These early movers are in many cases in very dominant market positions making it not only more difficult to regulate their behavior but also to keep the markets open for future competitors.

This workshop will evaluate current European and international attempts to deal with this situation. Although all four panelists have a legal background, the meeting will be less interested in an in-depth review of existing laws and their impact, but more in the underlying technological and ethical principles (and their inconsistencies) leading to the sitation described. Specific attention will be attributed to technology driven attempts to deal with the situation, such as privacy by design, privacy by default, usable privacy etc.

Organisation(s)

External organisation(s)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover

Volume

6

Pages

6-6

No. of pages

1

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908139

Publication date

2016

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

505002 Data protection

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/privacy-and-internet-governance(876b6c71-54e3-46a0-97bb-a44bd90c4430).html