Citizens need to remain wary about the ways in which their data may be misused by organisations who collect it in exchange for services, Dara Murphy, Minister of State for European Affairs and Data Protection said on Wednesday.
Opening a seminar on ethics and privacy at Trinity College, Mr Murphy said that a conversation on data protection and privacy needed to take place between individuals and society. Individuals remained willing to trade their data for services, but a recent EU survey indicated “trust remains low” that data will be adequately protected.
“We have to move the issue of data protection up the agenda,” he said.
The EU "right to be forgotten" –provided for by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a case brought by a Spanish citizen against Google – ruled that search engines must remove links to a limited range of incorrect or outdated information about individuals but raised many philosophical and ethical issues, said Oxford University professor of philosophy and ethics of information, Luciano Floridi.
Prof Floridi chaired a committee at Google, to determine how to implement the ruling.
The right to be forgotten was a complex clash between two fundamental rights: privacy and the right to control personal data, defended by the ECJ, and freedom of speech and access to information, argued for by Google, he said.
It was difficult to determine whether business or politics holds the balance of online power, he said. But search engines based in the US provide the online map to all available digital information, and select which information is given prioritised.
Providing a right to be forgotten, even within the limited framework of the ECJ decision, was challenging, Prof Floridi said. Algorithms cannot carry out the task, so humans must read through individual appeals to companies such as Google.
No clear definitions exist in the ruling for ‘public interest’ or “relevance”, or guidelines on deciding whether an individual is, or remains, a ‘public figure’, three categories used to decide if links to information should remain availabl.
The right to be forgotten was important in its own right but also is “an important spark because we are seeing an explosion of issues around it,” he said. “We need new thinking” to find solutions to these new problems.
The seminar was held in TCD’s new ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology.
