PRIVACY AND RIGHTS OF THE DIGITAL PERSON

PURPOSE

The purpose of the Privacy and Rights of the Digital Person Commission is to study the impact of new technologies and the Internet on privacy and human rights. Some of the issues normally broached in recent UIA seminars and congresses focus, in particular, on privacy in the digital era and disruptive technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things, etc. As well as the creation of new laws or the adaptation of existing laws to make the protection of fundamental rights more effective in an increasingly digitised society.

ACTIVITIES

The Commission currently has a group on LinkedIn on which it publishes news of interest to its members. The Commission’s members frequently publish articles in the Juriste International magazine on topical issues related to privacy and the rights of the digital person.

HISTORY OF THE COMMISSION

The Commission was set up in 2006 under the impetus of Alain Bensoussan, who chaired it until October 2012. It was then chaired by Marc Gallardo Meseguer, then Jean-François Henrotte and now Jérémy Bensoussan.

Since its inception, the subjects broached during UIA’s annual congress were as follows:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Kill Switch: Biotech and High Tech Companies Grow Up (Toronto, Canada, 2017)
• Privacy and Data Protection in a digital world : Towards an international regulatory approach for mass surveillance and profiling (Main theme Budapest, Hungary, 2016)
• Online Contracts: The Future (Budapest, Hungary, 2016)
• Managing Legal Risks – Compliance And Beyond (Valencia, Spain, 2015)
• How to Prepare for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Valencia, Spain, 2015)
• Who does data belong to? (Florence, Italy, 2014)
• Universal Rights of the Digital Person (Macau, China, 2013)
• Towards a charter of the rights of the digital person (Dresden, Germany, 2012)
• Privacy vs. the protection of personal data (Miami, USA, 2011)
• Ownership of personal data and modes of protection (Istanbul, Turkey, 2010)
• Fundamental rights against the Web 2.0 (Seville, Spain, 2009)
• Cyber-surveillance of employees (Bucharest, Rumania, 2008)
• Web 2.0 identity rights and virtual identity (Paris, France, 2007)
• Nominative data exchange and cross-border flows (Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, 2006)

HIGHLIGHTS

In 2014, the Commission initiated and coordinated internal work within UIA that led to the approval of the UIA 2015 Resolution entitled “Privacy in digital communication”. In 2016, the Commission took part in several UIA seminars and, in particular, organised one in mid-September in the Main Courtroom of the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg, on the European regulation on the protection of personal data.