Legal Safeguards for Ambient Intelligence

To take a full benefit of Ambient Intelligence, it is necessary to anticipate and react upon possible drawbacks and threats of the new emerging environment. The risks of new technologies should be examined in order to devise appropriate safeguards. This precautionary approach has been taken by SWAMI project which reflected on possible negative implications of AmI by constructing ‘dark scenarios’ showing possible technology failures. Analysis of the scenarios highlighted many possible problems, also for the legal framework. Current legislation and case law does not always address the threats of privacy sufficiently. The SWAMI consortium envisaged a number of legal safeguards that address lacunae in existing legislation. This article focuses on exploring only some of the lacunae in the privacy and data protection framework, and provides for examples of devised privacy-specific safeguards.