More than 1,,000 people from European institutions, national governments, data protection authorities, associations and academia gathered in Brussels on Wednesday 24 October to discuss ethics in the digital world at the 40th edition of the International Conference of Data Protection Commissioners.
Kicking off these "Olympic Games of Data Protection", the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), Giovanni Buttarelli, recalled that this year's conference was not about privacy, but about the human values that underpin it.
There has been, in his view, a generational change in privacy and "at this tipping point in our digital society, it is time to develop a clear and sustainable moral code", he said.
Indeed, if technology is still, for the moment, mainly deployed by man, we are not so far from the day when its design and control will be entirely delegated to machines, he explained, taking the example of killer drones which, without human intervention, can take the life of a human being.
And these practices, according to Mr Buttarelli, even if they are legal, call into question the basic notions of human dignity and their ethics are sometimes questionable. "We have to ask ourselves if our moral compass has been suspended in the race for numbers and innovation", he continued.
"Ethics is the sense we all have, often subconscious, of right and wrong in different circumstances", he explained. But today, in the digital sphere, there is no ethical consensus in Europe and even less so at the global level. Yet, according to him, there is an urgent need for one.
This need is confirmed by the results received from the public consultation launched in June on this issue by the EDPS. More than 80% of respondents stated that ethics related to new technologies is, or will soon be, on the agenda of their organisation, many of them considering it as "important", "extremely relevant" or even "mandatory". And 86% felt that public authorities had a role to play.
For the British Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, while regulators have a say, of course, companies must also do their duty by conducting ethics assessments, setting up consumer committees or appointing an independent expert to do so.
On Tuesday 23 October, the conference participants adopted a joint declaration in which they called for the establishment of common governance principles on artificial intelligence, in order to ensure that its development and use are carried out in accordance with ethics and human values.
Brexit. Asked at a press conference about the UK's future data protection relationship with the EU, Denham said she was "optimistic" about a data protection agreement or adequacy decision, given the legal intertwining between the EU and the UK.
In doing so, however, it made it clear that a simple adequacy decision was not the best way forward, favouring the British Government's idea of "adequacy".
"I think the United Kingdom is special [...] There are benefits for both sides to have something that goes beyond adequacy", she argued. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)