The Commission will be investigating whether or not an individual has the right to disappear from the ever-more pervasive technology and e-networks that surround us. The Commission's concerns also include the privacy implications of personally-identifying technologies, citing RFID chips as one such example. It is thought that the debate will look at the technical and legal aspects of what the Commission refers to as the right to 'silence' the chips.
The Commission is not alone in raising this question. Several commentators have also raised views about this concept expressing the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time.
The Commission's consultation will form part of a wider plan published by the Commission outlining how it will create legislation to regulate what it refers to as the 'internet of things'. This looks to the increasing automatic communication between technology, devices and tags that are constituent parts of complex networks around individuals. The Commission refers to several examples of how such technology forms part of the environment around us, for example, the interconnectivity between:
- cars and traffic lights, a system used to address congestion issues;
- home appliances and smart grids and energy metering that enables individuals to asses their power consumption; and
- pedestrian footpaths that will guide the visually impaired
Whilst technology has the potential to improve everyday life, the Commission believes that individuals should lead the technology drive and not vice versa.
The Commission also believes that current trends towards the interconnection of objects as well as people using networks and enabling chips such as RFID will continue but there should be a balance stuck when creating such environments to ensure that privacy and data protection are considered. This consideration should be built in from the outset, perhaps striking some similarities with privacy by design concepts. Furthermore, the Commissioner will produce statistics on the use of RFID chips starting in December 2009 to progress its work in this area.
The Consultation's full paper can be accessed at:
ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/rfid/documents/commiot2009.pdf
Comment
Any drive towards 'chip silence' will create practical problems for operators and data controllers to overcome. Practical issues around 'opt-out' mechanisms will inevitably create implementation challenges and more so when such technology is ubiquitous. For example, will this raise a genuine opt-out scenario or will it be a matter of data suppression? Both will lead to 'chip silence' but only one will address the core issue of stopping data collection. Given the ubiquitous nature of such technology, how will a data subject know who the data controller is, if indeed there is only one data controller as part of the service? It will be interesting to see if the Commission will debate the practical solutions as part of the outcome of any further work in this area.
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