Privacy Implications of Emerging and Future Technologies

Privacy and technology are entangled in an endless relationship. Privacy is said to have died, but persistent research, as well as our daily experience, indicate otherwise: citizens and users are still interested in maintaining their privacy. The PRACTIS project forecasted future technology and tried to assess their privacy implications. Previous segments of the project conducted a technological horizon scanning and pointed to various technologies that are likely to have a substantial impact on our privacy. The current report assesses the legal and ethical implications of privacy and future technology. We analyze the future implications within a framework of pointing to various privacy challenges, and ways to (partially) address them. The first is the continuous decrease of user's control over their personal data. We conceptualize this challenge as a matter of the meeting points between the data controller and data subject, and call for re-empowering the subject. A second is privacy divides, which are difference of the level of privacy among subjects, which are not the result of the subjects' own will. Additional privacy challenges are distributed agency, the privacy paradox, conflicts with other interests and rights, and the individualization of privacy. The report provides a legal overview of data protection and informational privacy law in the EU and the U.S., generalizes the features of future technologies that are likely to impact privacy, searches for the privacy challenges, and then examines whether current law might already have some answers (with only a partial positive answer). The Report then assesses the privacy challenges vis-à-vis scenarios, developed in previous segments of PRACTIS