On the principle of privacy by design and its limits: Technology, ethics and the rule of law

Abstract

Over the last years lawmakers, privacy commissioners and scholars have discussed the idea of embedding data protection safeguards in ICT and other types of technology, by means of value-sensitive design, AI and legal ontologies, PeCAM platforms, and more. Whereas this kind of effort is offering fruitful solutions for operating systems, health care technologies, social networks and smart environments, the paper stresses some critical aspects of the principle by examining technological limits, ethical constraints and legal conditions of privacy by design, so as to prevent some misapprehensions of the current debate. The idea should be to decrease the entropy of the system via ‘digital air-bags’ and to strengthen people’s rights by widening the range of their choices, rather than preventing harm generating behaviour from occurring through the use of self-enforcement technologies.