Emergent technologies and the transformations of privacy and data protection

PRESCIENT, the acronym for Privacy and emerging fields of science and technology: Towards a common framework for privacy and ethical assessment, was a three-year research project funded by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Programme, part of the Science in Society activities of the EC’s DG Research and Innovation. The research project was carried out by a multidisciplinary and international research consortium consisting of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI (Karlsruhe), Trilateral Research & Consulting (London), the Centre for Science, Society and Citizenship (CSSC, Rome) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s research group on Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS, Brussels). Started in 2010 the project has ended in March 2013. PRESCIENT’s aim was to provide insights that may contribute to an early identification of privacy related issues arising from emerging technologies, taking seriously both the need to distinguish between privacy and data protection, and the contrasts between the legal, socioeconomic and ethical conceptualisations of each, which do not necessarily match neither have the same kind of consequences. In other words, the project wanted to elaborate the means for an early anticipation of dangers and risks related to emerging technologies along the lines of an imaginary matrix with two rows distinguishing between privacy and data protection issues, and four columns representing distinct approaches: the legal, ethical, social and economical approaches. Among other things the project has elaborated an extended sociological privacy typology that takes into account current and future challenges posed by emergent technologies such as soft biometrics, full DNA sequencing, unmanned aircraft systems or human enhancement technologies (Kukk and Husing, 2011; Finn and Wright, 2012; Finn et al., 2013). The legal research aimed at outlining themanner in which EU law has constructed the rights to privacy and to personal data protection. Indeed, from a legal viewpoint the two rights have a different content and architecture, and they are underpinned by another rationale (data protection therefore being both more and less than “informational privacy”, as is often posited). Building upon this, it has then tried to determine how to best articulate the two rights in the face of future and emergent technologies (for a more in depth account see, Gellert and Gutwirth, 2013). The ethical approach to privacy and data protection, concerned with morality in social sciences and humanities terms, has then investigated the ethical caveats surrounding privacy and data protection. Finally the PRESCIENT team has suggested a framework for an integrated approach towards privacy and ethical impact assessment which is a timely topic in the light of the current reform of the European data protection framework and technology governance approaches summarised under the umbrella term “responsible research and innovation” (Owen et al., 2012; Wright and Friedewald, 2013). On 27 and 28 November 2012, the PRESCIENT consortium organised the project’s final conference in Berlin. This well attended International Conference on Privacy and Emerging Technologies brought together an impressive list of speakers and interventions, representing different perspectives and scientific disciplines, as well as representatives of different concerns and views on the issues. The articles brought together in the present issue of Computer Law and Security Review are all an elaboration of legal papers that were submitted