Tech guru Peter Warren is advising EU, UK and French policymakers on Internet ethics.![IMG_0831[1]](https://futureintelligence.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IMG_08311.jpg)
The Future Intelligence editor has co-authored a report calling for radical changes in the way software is marketed and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are governed, and even an overhaul of the very bedrock of the Internet – the Domain Name Servers (DNS) code that underpins websites. ‘What ethics do we need in the digital age?’ asks the report. Warren highlights five key points: humans first, anonymity, device sanctity, software registration and statutory disclosure of data breaches.
Manifesto
Contributors include Adrian Cheok, Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London and Imperial College’s Professor of Cognitive Robotics Murray Shanahan. Commissioned by the Netopia website, the report has been presented to EU policymakers in Brussels including Nicole Dewandre, Advisor on the Digital Agenda to EU commissioner Neelie Croes. Members of the French Senate – the upper house of parliament – are also being briefed by the authors. And the UK Home Office and Shadow Cabinet have requested copies of the report and insights from the authors as they prepare their policy manifesto pledges for next year’s British general election.
Peter Warren – author of two books on cyber security (2004 and 2014) – fears the Internet of Things will produce a proliferation of personal data . When every household object and street furniture such as lamp posts each has its own IP address, it will be possible to track individual citizens’ every move in real time – including geographical location, buying habits and relationships. This mass of information will be open to abuse by criminals, spies and government bodies seeking to profit from the huge datasets they collect through taxation records and by delivering public services such as health and social care of older people. Insurance companies, for example, would benefit from knowing individuals’ health records and there is a debate about whether such confidential information can really be kept private in the age of big data.
“Fuzzy matching of datasets makes it easy to overlay anonymised statistics to such an extent that it is possible to pinpoint the individual. For example, combining CCTV footage with coffee shop receipts and smart meters in the home that measure energy use will yield some very precise results. At the moment governments do not pool these datasets – at least not officially. If we care about protecting our privacy and identity online we should keep it that way” says Warren.
Professor Cheok disagrees: ” I think very soon most people will opt to have all their information publicly available – just because it’s easier.”
Addressing a working party of the French Senate at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, Peter Warren stressed that humans must be at the heart of digital ethics and pointed out that all major industries – avionics, energy supply, transport – are governed by safety regulations. He calls for compulsory registration of new software before it is released – a system that might operate like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the British National Institute of Clinical Excellence, the bodies which regulate new medicines and therapies.
Read the full report Paris Senate 2014
Watch the full proceedings Evidence to information mission of the Senate
Meanwhile the French Senate is taking its own initiatives to protect its citizens online. It has passed a new law asserting the ‘right to be forgotten’ (le droit a l’oubli). Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, the rapporteur of the working party on digital ethics, believes it is needed because of the proliferation of big data. She says that – if it is passed by the National Assembly – this new law will give individual French citizens the right to get back their own data wherever it was stored by government of companies and to delete it or set limits on how long it can be kept.
Senator Morin-Desailly believes this new restriction is in keeping with the tradition of liberty that began in France with the Revolution of 1789.
