Title: WORKPLAN D7.9

Ambient Law is the articulation of legal rules in technological infrastructure. This will be the working definition for D7.9, which may be refined at the end.  

Provisional elaboration in draft for VUB contribution D14.2

In the course of the FIDIS cooperation within the workpackage on profiling we have come to the conclusion that to achieve an effective legal regulation of the access to and use of profiles (including the possibility to contest these), this regulation must be articulated in the technological design of AmI devices. The vision of AmI thus requires a vision of Ambient Law. At present, workpackage 7 on profiling is preparing the ground for a report on such ‘Ambient Law’, to be finalised in the middle of 2007. A vision of Ambient Law should reflect on the technological embodiment of legal or of other regulatory (i.e., behaviour-influencing) rules and on the regulatory side-effects of technological developments and applications. On the one hand, in AmI applications, rules may be embedded that influence people’s behaviours or choices and thus impact their fundamental rights. AmI could for example embed privacy-threatening or transparency-threatening technologies. On the other hand, AmI can also use technologies that countervail the ‘technologies of control’ used in an AmI world. For example, such ambient law could require:

1. technological embodiment of mandatory data-protection legislation, effectively ruling out non-compliance by service providers; 

2. technological embodiment of transparency, for instance requiring a user’s proxy that is able to detect the types of profiles that may be applied and that warns the user if this may be disadvantagous; 

3. technological embodiment of machine to machine (M2M) communication to negotiate with the service provider about the level of anonymity and unlinkability 

4. technological embodiment of machine to machine (M2M) communication to negotiate about the application of profiles predefined by the (potential) client; such negotiations could concern the terms of the contracts made between service provider and client, for instance the price, the exchange of data etc.  

Having access to the types of profiles that may be applied should reduce the risk of falling victim to illegitimate price (or other) discrimination and should counter attempts to manipulate behaviour without awareness of the client.