Title: INTRODUCTION

Background: the vision of Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence is a development of ICT which seamlessly integrates smart devices into the environment. The home, the workplace, the shopping-mall – all kinds of private, semi-public, and public spaces will become equipped with embedded technologies that interact with the people moving in them. This development is known under various labels, such as Ubiquitous Computing. In this report, we use the term Ambient Intelligence (AmI), which has a rich association potential. It stresses a fundamental change in the way mankind will interact with its surroundings. While man has through the ages slowly developed intelligence, lately also embedding this in sophisticated devices, we now move to an age where we equip our entire environment with tools to ‘think’ of its own and to make ‘smart’ decisions for us.

In an AmI world, people will be surrounded by intelligent interfaces supported by computing and networking technology that is everywhere and embedded in everyday objects like walls, screens, furniture, clothes, vehicles, and roads. In the vision of Ambient Intelligence, computing capabilities are always on, connected, present everywhere, enabling people and devices to interact with each other and with their environment. The enabling technologies of AmI, such as RFID and other sensor technologies, data mining, and above all profiling – as described in earlier reports –, are quickly moving forward. Nevertheless, AmI is still a vision, and it will take considerable time for it to become a reality. We do not doubt that AmI will emerge in some form or another at some point in time. It is rather how exactly AmI will look like that is the important question. Widely diverging scenarios are possible, depending on how, for what purposes, and by whom the AmI architecture will be determined. And these diverging scenarios have a very different look and feel for the users who will have to live in these future environments. The scope and adequacy of legal protection is one element of this AmI look and feel, and this brings us to the topic of this report: the role of the law in determining the architecture of Ambient Intelligence.