This is coverage of at WSJ interview with Amelia Andersdotter the former European Parliament member from the Pirate Party from Sweden. Some quote stuck out for me as being relevant
If we also believe that freedom and individualism, empowerment and democratic rights, are valuable, then we should not be constructing and exploiting systems of control where individual disempowerment are prerequisites for the system to be legal.
We can say that most of the legislation around Internet users protect systems from individuals. I believe that individuals should be protected from the system. Individual empowerment means the individual is able to deal with a system, use a system, work with a system, innovate on a system—for whatever purpose, social or economic. Right now we have a lot of legislation that hinders such [empowerment]. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have anarchy in the sense that you have no laws or that anyone can do whatever they want at anytime. It’s more a question of ensuring that the capabilities you are deterring are actually the capabilities that are most useful to deter. [emphasis mine].
This statement is key “individuals should be protected from the system” How do we create accountability from systems to people and not just the other way around. I continue to raise this issue about so called trust frameworks that are proposed as the solution to interoperable digital identity – there are many concerning aspects to the solutions including what seems to be very low levels of accountability of systems to people.
The quotes from Ameila continued…
I think the Internet and Internet policy are very good tools for bringing power closer to people, decentralizing and ensuring that we have distributive power and distributive solutions. This needs to be built into the technical, as well as the political framework. It is a real challenge for the European Union to win back the confidence of European voters because I think a lot of people are increasingly concerned that they don’t have power or influence over tools and situations that arise in their day-to-day lives.
The European Union needs to be more user-centric. It must provide more control [directly] to users. If the European Union decides that intermediaries could not develop technologies specifically to disempower end users, we could have a major shift in global political and technical culture, not only in Europe but worldwide, that would benefit everyone.
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