TECHNOLOGY-BASED RESEARCH AGENDA ON THE DATA PROTECTION LAW

This paper discusses legal and ethical privacy issues that scenarios on future information products and services, especially mobile devices, ubiquitous computing, and ambient intelligence technologies arise. First, some general observations of privacy law are presented. Then a few scenarios and examples of future technologies are briefly introduced. Finally, legal and ethical issues that the scenarios bring out are further elaborated. It appears that current data protection legislation does not adequately regulate forthcoming challenges. The quantitative change, namely the increasing number of privacy issues highlights the existing problems in the data protection law, but the qualitative changes, like changing notions, biased laws, as well as new kind of challenges will call for more radical reforms. Therefore issues that need to be studied further to improve the law are concluded