Digital integrity of the human person, a new fundamental right 2020 update
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Roussel, Alexis
Every human evolves today in multi-dimensional physical and digital environment. If each individual is to keep its individuality and autonomy in its daily choices, it must be protected and given effective tools to defend its own autonomy. Recognizing that human life has been digitally extended must question ourselves on what makes us human today. Should personal data be considered as component of the person, rather than objects that can be owned by whoever collects that data? Should our digital integrity be protected? If each human person already has a right to physical and mental integrity (Swiss Constitution article 10 al.2), shouldn’t it have a right to digital integrity? This talk will introduce this new legal concept, its possible implications for data protection and how this concept could be introduced in the current legal framework. The talk will also be an update of the implementation work.
 Hey, hello everybody. Welcome back to the stream of the SpeakVestion.in3. If you'd like to ask a question to our speaker, you can do this by using the chat function on the TV load streaming function. The next speaker here is Alexi Russel, former president of the Swiss Pirate Party. He will speak today about the digital integrity of the human person and new fundamental right 2020 update. I will do the presentation in English. I was authorized to do so. I am working on this right to digital integrity of the human person. There has been a lot of evolution during the last year. I already presented one year ago in Leipzig. I am doing updates on the changes that are coming. I will present again what this right is about. I will go into some of the details and see what are the updates of this year and what hopefully we can expect next year. This is a right that people didn't hear much already. In Switzerland it is being used more and more. There are some real cases of some constitutions trying to get this right into some of the local constitutions. It all comes down from this key moment which Peter Sender summarized very well. When the judge asked Peter Sender during the Pirate Bay trial if he meets people in real life and then he answers no. We don't use the expression in real life because we use the expression away from keyboard because for us internet is real. This small expression is an old expression in our world. It shows that there is a change of perception between the old world where you have people. For example, Angela Merkel and her and they see the new world with the New Zealand and then there is the people today, most of the people who live in a continuity with the digital space. They don't see the difference. There is a lot of search for a core digital human right. The objective of this core digital human right is to protect and give us some guidelines on how to ensure that people are safe in the digital space also. It has to be understood and enforceable by everyone. It has to be something very simple. Here the concept is very simple. There is next to the physical and mental integrity of a human person. There is also a digital integrity of the human person. Why do we have first the integrity? Why does it exist? In German it's called Unversertheid. Why does it exist and why it is put in constitutions at very high level in the constitution? It's because it's the only way to guarantee the autonomy and the freedom of the person. Basically, if you allow one person to be safe, to be protected physically, then you can ensure that this person is going to take decisions without physical constraints. Very simple. If you go to the voting booth and you want to vote and if someone is hitting you at the same time, you will not vote the same way that if you are not hit. It looks very simple, but I believe we can also apply the same type of guarantee in the digital world. There has been already a movement which says that one to protect digital self-determination. This is exactly this. Digital self-determination is a way to recognize that also in the digital space, people need to be autonomous, they need to be free in their capacity of taking this decision. For this, their entity, the person, has to be protected. I see the right to digital integrity to guarantee this right to self-determination. The right to self-determination exists already since some years. It has been actually also established by the German High Court in 2008. It is recognized by some scholars in Switzerland that inside the constitutions today, we consider that this right of self-bestimmung is present in Article 13, which is about data protection. But it is not very rightly implemented. It is a bit hard to understand from there because the text says, you are only protected against the abuses. This is very specific and it is very hard to enforce information that is self-bestimmung or digital self-determination based on the current article in the Constitution. That is why there is another article, which is higher up in the Constitution, which is the right of life. The right of life is Article 10 in the Swiss Constitution. It is the article which is the most important because it is the first article that provides you as a human being in the society with the state saying that it is not going to protect your life and it is going to give you the space to be an active citizen, an active person. Without this right of life, then you don't have any other rights. All the other rights that you have, which is the right of movement, the right of free speech, the right of privacy, any other right is derived from this right to life. It has a very long history but basically it has been written down quite recently. The right of life is usually combined with two specific rights, which is the right to your physical integrity and the right to your mental integrity. These are put usually in the Constitution. Some constitutions only have one, some constitutions don't have any of those two. They only have the right to life but the right to life is really present everywhere. Now that we have our life which has been digitally extended, we also could consider that our right to our integrity of ourselves should be extended also. But it raises some questions and it has some consequences actually. One of the first consequences which has already been established by some groups, and one of the groups is called the APDP, it's an association of French-speaking data protection officers or organizations like Kniele in France, like the EDUB in Switzerland and many other countries. They came together and they made a political statement in 2018 saying that personal data are not an object that you can buy and sell. It is actually part of the human person. It's part of your personhood and so it has specific rights which are inalienable. You cannot remove those rights from your data and these rights cannot be sold also. They cannot be transferred because they are inalienable. So here when we talk about the integrity of the person, of course if we talk about the physical integrity it's pretty easy to understand. We have a body and no one is allowed to chop my arm without any reason. But for the digital space it's a bit different because what is my digital self in the digital realm? So it is actually my data. But it's not very well defined exactly. There are some studies about all the different types of data that we have. But then it's more like a very large concept. So now these data are not objects that you can buy and sell like in the US. They have this Silicon Way approach where they can just buy data, resell it, reuse it against the person. Or there is the Chinese or the Russian approach which is more like data is part of the common good. Your personal data is actually not owned by yourself but it's owned by the society. And then can be used against you for the good of the society. And this is what we see in China or in Russia. So here the idea is that the data are part of yourself. And that's why we can say then that the state through the constitution should protect the integrity of these data and should not interfere with those as long as it affects your autonomy, your capacity of taking decision. One very good example is Cambridge and Melitika where organization used personal data and interfered in the information bubble to change the way of some people of how they would feel and then to make them vote a certain way. So this is clearly a manipulation of their digital personhood that affected their digital integrity and it affected their vote. So from there one of my considerations is that just harvesting data, if you are starting to get data over people without them being informed and have given consent, then basically this is already harming the digital integrity of the person. The fact that you have third parties that are collecting data without you having an interaction with them could be a state organization or could be a private organization, but this is already not acceptable without you having given consent. And also the last consequence that is important is that it comes with a realization that actually no one knows or no one understands the extent of his personal data. And this is very important because one of the critics of current, one of the critics of people who want to fight for their digital rights is, oh but you just have to be responsible and don't put things on Facebook if you don't, if you don't want your data to be leaked, just don't put your data there at the first place. Obviously this is a very bad understanding of how internet is working, so you can argue yes, but you don't know what metadata is and you don't understand what are the consequences. It's not just about my poster on Facebook, it's the fact that my friends are using my data over Facebook, which I don't control, but the reality is actually bigger, is that no one has full knowledge and full comprehension of the extent of his personal data. That's just impossible to have, so the whole system must be made taking this into account. We should be protected wherever our data is, even if we are not aware that the data is somewhere. And in Switzerland this is really the case right now. If you want to enforce your right, your right to data access, your right to data deletion and so on, you really need to know where they are and you need to act precisely. And this is really limitative. So breaking the nothing to hide logic, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry. I think that what that is, a key thing that was always struggling before this right came, is that a lot of people put digital right in the framework of privacy. Privacy is a way to live a life on your protected, you know, and enforcing your digital right is actually not only about making sure that you can hide away and have a private life. It's just actually a way to make you, to make you self, be able to take freely decision also in the digital realm. When we talk about digital integrity, it opens up, it breaks this logic of putting people who are fighting for digital rights just in a place where we suspect them to hide something. And that's not the case actually. Most of us, we don't hide anything and we have like normal, boring life like everyone. But just we want to keep our autonomy and then when we don't want to have, to see algorithm influence our own decision making, for example, that's one example. So digital integrity and GDPR, this is a question I get often, is it compatible? Is it incompatible? It's a very good example that every time you make a big statement, a big fundamental right, you need to have laws which come and implement specifics. And GDPR is exactly this. GDPR is a big law which is implementing specifics about how data has to be managed. And most of it is actually not bad. But it has a, so it's a good compliment to the main principle. But the problem is that it is incompatible within its Article 2. And the Article 2 of the GDPR is what I call the security black hole. It's basically that as soon as a state says that there is this kind of security concern around the situation, then they can collect data for no reason. I mean, they don't have to justify and they can avoid, they can be excluded from GDPR and just collect all the data they want. So this has to be removed with time. It has to be, it has been already reduced a bit by conventions 108 from the Council of Europe. But basically the idea is that every, if we have a right to digital integrity, then this right is actually, it imposes itself on the state. So the state should give the example. That's, this is why we need a right to digital integrity. The right to digital integrity is basically asking the state to treat his digital citizens the right way. As free and responsible person who can take their own decisions and they should provide the right tools to the citizens to be able to have this life and to defend their digital autonomy. So states should be an example. And today what we see is that states are not examples. They are establishing mass surveillance even though they are in democracies. They are working, they are working with private sector companies like Palantir for example, which are collecting data and they have the creating systems, very connected systems between different governments and private companies and they create a system which is called today, capitalism of surveillance. So the state should be actually on the side of the citizen and be able to let the citizen protect its own autonomy, its individual autonomy. So at the end the right of digital integrity is, should be, I hope, or can be in the future, the justification for the right to data protection as a whole. So data protection is only seen as one element to allow people also in the digital sphere to be autonomous. So now how are we going to implement this? And this is what we, what's the most interesting is that once we have the right we need to put it somewhere. And actually there is, so there's two main texts which are proposed. So it's the Charter of Fundamental Right of the European Union and the Swiss Constitution. I mean those are two ones which I have somehow I can work on. So they have a similar article, Article 3.1 and Article 10.2, which says for the Swiss one it says, every person has a right to personal liberty and in particular to physical and mental integrity and to freedom of movement. So the idea here is very simple, is to embrace actually our digital society and accept that today we are only social human beings because we also interact digitally, not only physically. So we add the digital part of our self in these articles. So for example the Charter of Fundamental Rights could become, everyone has the right to the respect of his and her physical, mental and digital integrity. So from there some work has started, it started very slowly a couple of years ago. It's a long process which has started 10 years ago but in Switzerland we already have three work which are in progress. And the first one is in Vale. These are state levels, so constitutional levels for people who are not in Switzerland. So it's a federation so every canton has its own constitutions and they have for some a collection of fundamental rights which is included in their own constitution so they can add them. So Vale has one specific, is in one specific moment right now because they are renewing their own constitutions so they are rewriting it from scratch. And they have a whole assembly for this that they voted and there is a commission on fundamental rights that has added this right to digital integrity as a separate line but in the same paragraph as in the right of life. And that should be, that is in discussion right now and we'll just comment a bit later on what it triggered, it's very interesting. Contour of Geneva has also started some work. One of the main local parties has decided to make an initiative to collect signatures but because of coronavirus collecting signatures in the middle of the pandemic is not a very easy task so they sadly decided to cancel it. But they're going to submit a constitutional law so that's a whole parliamentarian process within the Geneva institutions so that it can go through without a people vote but there will be referendum but there won't be an initiative. Contour Neuchâtel where I am, there is some work that is being prepared also in that way. So the debate in Valais and that was interesting, you can find the documentation on their website, I put the link there, it's in French and in German. But basically they, my message to them was really okay, there is this right to digital integrity and you should try to add this and they really listened to that and they took it. They put it and unanimously they added, I mean this commission, it's not voted, it has to still be voted by the people of Valais and there's a lot of process still. But the commission on fundamental rights, they accepted to add this right to digital integrity. But they came up with other rights and that's really interesting because they tried out several ones. One of them is every person has a right to control its digital identity and I think in the context of the EID law it's pretty interesting how it came up. So they put that because they first put the right to digital integrity and then so when they talk about digital identity then they said everyone should be in control. And in control it's very important because it means that the way you treat certain parties has to be very specific, we have to define that. But also it added in the same line, it says it has a special right to anonymity within the digital realm. I think that's very interesting a right, so that's the first occurrence where there's a proposition of the right of anonymity. There is another right that was proposed but refused by the commission, so there was a minority report on this right, is that there was a right not to be surveilled, measured or analyzed but for some reason which was not completely, they thought it was a bit too much maybe to do this. And the third thing is also linked to the right to be disconnected which is also interesting. Every person is allowed to communicate with authorities without using any specific technology and this is a trend we see right now where a government are pushing people to the digital connection and it's actually letting a lot of people out and or maybe some people are using those tools but basically are losing the control over those tools that they're using and they're losing the control in their relationship with their own state. So if you try to have a state that creates confidence with their citizen but you give them tools that they don't understand right now because they don't have the education, because they don't have control over the tools, that's not going to increase the overall confidence in the state. So it's actually not going in the other direction and basically when you think about that every person has a right to digital integrity, then you think about these things. This year we added a Wikipedia article in French which the link is on the screen. It was really an interesting exercise that we did here. It's a very simple article which goes through a bit of the situation in Switzerland. The best lesson that we learned from this is that as soon as there's a Wikipedia page then it's a real thing. Because people, the first thing they will do if you talk about something, they will go on internet and they will search the topic and they will see the first link as a Wikipedia page. So they talk about something which is right. I just made one mistake which I didn't know at that time is that we should never use like parenthesis at the end of a link. It really is very bad for sharing the link. So the Wikipedia page got some interest and there's already some other external editors on this article which is interesting. This year and it's just like released a few days ago. We have the first publication so in the beginning of the year 2020 there was a one day colloquium at the University of Law of Nechapel about the topic. I was presenting someone from the Valais constitution was presenting and then all the teacher professors from key elements like constitutional law, criminal law, civil law, international civil law they all presented and they made their own analysis of this new right. So now we have this booklet which is actually a book with the contribution of all these authors that has been published a couple of weeks ago. So that's the first legal publication. It's important because now people can start referencing this right and put references in their own work and start to use this as doctrine. So this is a doctrinal work that we've been doing. I've been presenting this in going around. So I was last year at the CCC also I was at the Winter Congress and we recently presented it also at the Internet Governance Forum which is a good place to have outreach. These are older achievements but I'm still putting them there because they're quite interesting. SWECO is an association in Switzerland about the digital world and they made a survey in 2019 for all the candidates of the national elections of 2019. There was a question, we were able to add this question in the survey where they were asked what do you think about a right to digital integrity and there was a very high support. So even though it was not a topic at that moment and maybe when they saw the question they felt naturally that it was a good thing. The Greens in Switzerland voted, they agreed up to 99% or 95% and SVOP which is like the most conservative, let's say they agreed up at 55% which is not bad actually. The Swiss Socialist Party has made in 2015, so that was a long time ago, a paper on internet, a position on the internet and they did it in a way which is pretty interesting. There's the link also there on the screen. They really made a work and they involved a lot of people from experts in the community to try to find a way to define what is socialism in the age of internet and how their view should be on the internet. They also integrated, after a proposition that we made, they also integrated the right to digital integrity and they really made it in a way that it's linked to the right to self-determination. So this is how they see it very well. They understood. So in terms of future work this year there will be few things happening. So first there is an essay which is going to be published also. So this is more like a political book publication that will be published in April which is explaining a bit the thinking about this. So it's not legal work like the first one which is more legal analysis and legal critiques, but this is really like a digital essay and thinking, wishful thinking about how it could have an impact on the society. There's a lot of legal research that is going to start in Neuchâtel University. There is even a new laboratory in the law university about the tech and they're going to take this subject too. Hopefully we are going to have some initiatives. So I'm just going to finalize now with the last thing is that, okay, some people say, yeah, great Alexi, I like this and I want to help somehow. And the idea is actually the first thing that we have to do is keep on building the things that we are building right now actually that protects our digital integrity. So everything which is based on anonymization, all the decentralized tool, all those new tools that we are thriving, we are working with and we are thriving in, these we need to keep building. And we can just add this little touch that does it protect my digital integrity? Yes or no. Myself, I'm working on helping people to build an anonymization network and that's exactly in line with my thinking. Of course then we can also, whenever, and I hope the next time the digital society has a successful judicial process, they can ask the question, okay, in this case, did we hurt? Hurt the digital integrity of the people. It's something that you can take into a legal procedure and ask this question. Now that there are some doctrine, people, the judges can go and be questioned about this. Yeah, basically, and of course you can always express yourself and use this term by saying, instead of saying, no, I want to be private. I don't want people to see me, to see my private information on my social network. You can say to people who don't understand, who are still in the thematic of saying, oh, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. You can say, yeah, but it does affect my digital integrity. It does affect my way I can take a decision. So it's a different language that you can propose to this. And obviously, if you want to help support initiatives, local initiatives in Switzerland, if you're in Switzerland, there's a lot of content where you can easily make a local initiative, support them financially or actually help them. And yeah, that's it. Thank you, Alexis, very much for your talk and also for your engagement here in this area. Very interesting. So I'm a little bit lost now so kind of use some problem. The IOC channel is not working at least not for me. So but I have two questions. So the first is probably or maybe I need to eat your one. So it looks to me that in the French part of Switzerland, this initiative is way further grown up. So is this just by chance or is it because you're more active there or is it because people are more open minded to this kind of topic? So I've been more active and I had the chance to really engage with scholars in the University of Neuchâtel, in the University of Geneva. So it has been picked up from there. And because it has been picked up by scholars, then it had echo in the constitutional hearings in Valais and in Geneva. So yeah, it was mostly due to the fact that one of the reasons I was there more active so it could spread. But now it's spreading on its own. So I have to do the same thing in this was German part. Maybe you can support you there. So the same thing which came to mind when you were talking more at the beginning of the talk where you were mentioning, for example Cambridge Analytica or this kind of thing. And such tools are starting to influence your political general, your mind. That's also violating your digital integrity. And the other hand, even in the non-digital world, so we have advertising for political things on the streets. And then it's of course not, or at least to me of course not a digital integrity. So the question would then be, where would you see here the border? When would you call it as a violation of the digital integrity and where would you say it's kind of normal add or even part of the healthy political discussion which are needed in a democratic. So it's all a matter of balance. Okay. For example, in the physical world, you have propaganda, you have political advertisement. But for example, you're not allowed to have subliminal messages like in the movies, you know, like when they put one frame and to change your mind. So it is already accepted and that you can put political posters in the streets, but you cannot do subliminal messages. So you see that that's one example where the society made some decisions. And I think it will be the same for online political publicity. If it's something which is outspoken, which is presented and it's known to be political publicity. That's probably something that the society will think it's okay. What is not okay is when the people are not aware of the functioning of the algorithm and that the people are using those tools knowing that the people don't understand and are pushing data to change their mindset. This is different because then you don't have the tools to fight yourself against that because you're inside your bubble and you think that you're seeing the reality and in fact the reality is induced by some political messages that you're seeing. So I think that's way over the limits that the society should accept. Okay. Now we should need to find the right balance and the balance will be always at if does a normal person who is not stupid enough strong. Is it facing that kind of publicity? Will he be strong or she be strong enough to understand what it is and still to take his own decision. That will be the balance. Alright, so you still have no access to the fire state channel. I'd like to thank you again for the talk and for answering at least my question. Thank you very much. And thank you for everyone who was tuning in. So we are having now a break until eight o'clock Swiss time. So that's almost one hour. And then the next talk will be about bioinformatics. Thank you.
 Hey, hello everybody.  Welcome back to the stream of the  SpeakVestion.in3. If you'd like to ask a question to our speaker, you can do this by using the chat function on the TV load streaming function.  The next speaker here is Alexi Russel, former president of the Swiss Pirate Party.  He will speak today about the digital integrity of the human person and new fundamental right 2020 update.  I will do the presentation in English. I was authorized to do so.  I am working on this right to digital integrity of the human person. There has been a lot of evolution during the last year.  I already presented one year ago in Leipzig.  I am doing updates on the changes that are coming.  I will present again what this right is about.  I will go into some of the details and see what are the updates of this year and what hopefully we can expect next year.  This is a right that people didn't hear much already.  In Switzerland it is being used more and more.  There are some real cases of some constitutions trying to get this right into some of the local constitutions.  It all comes down from this key moment which Peter Sender summarized very well.  When the judge asked Peter Sender during the Pirate Bay trial if he meets people in real life and then he answers no.  We don't use the expression in real life because we use the expression away from keyboard because for us internet is real.  This small expression is an old expression in our world.  It shows that there is a change of perception between the old world where you have people.  For example, Angela Merkel and her and they see the new world with the New Zealand and then there is the people today,  most of the people who live in a continuity with the digital space.  They don't see the difference.  There is a lot of search for a core digital human right.  The objective of this core digital human right is to protect and give us some guidelines on how to ensure that people are safe in the digital space also.  It has to be understood and enforceable by everyone.  It has to be something very simple.  Here the concept is very simple.  There is next to the physical and mental integrity of a human person.  There is also a digital integrity of the human person.  Why do we have first the integrity?  Why does it exist?  In German it's called Unversertheid.  Why does it exist and why it is put in constitutions at very high level in the constitution?  It's because it's the only way to guarantee the autonomy and the freedom of the person.  Basically, if you allow one person to be safe, to be protected physically,  then you can ensure that this person is going to take decisions without physical constraints.  Very simple.  If you go to the voting booth and you want to vote and if someone is hitting you at the same time,  you will not vote the same way that if you are not hit.  It looks very simple, but I believe we can also apply the same type of guarantee in the digital world.  There has been already a movement which says that one to protect digital self-determination.  This is exactly this.  Digital self-determination is a way to recognize that also in the digital space,  people need to be autonomous, they need to be free in their capacity of taking this decision.  For this, their entity, the person, has to be protected.  I see the right to digital integrity to guarantee this right to self-determination.  The right to self-determination exists already since some years.  It has been actually also established by the German High Court in 2008.  It is recognized by some scholars in Switzerland that inside the constitutions today,  we consider that this right of self-bestimmung is present in Article 13, which is about data protection.  But it is not very rightly implemented.  It is a bit hard to understand from there because the text says,  you are only protected against the abuses.  This is very specific and it is very hard to enforce information that is self-bestimmung  or digital self-determination based on the current article in the Constitution.  That is why there is another article, which is higher up in the Constitution, which is the right of life.  The right of life is Article 10 in the Swiss Constitution.  It is the article which is the most important because it is the first article that provides you as a human being  in the society with the state saying that it is not going to protect your life  and it is going to give you the space to be an active citizen, an active person.  Without this right of life, then you don't have any other rights.  All the other rights that you have, which is the right of movement, the right of free speech, the right of privacy,  any other right is derived from this right to life.  It has a very long history but basically it has been written down quite recently.  The right of life is usually combined with two specific rights,  which is the right to your physical integrity and the right to your mental integrity.  These are put usually in the Constitution.  Some constitutions only have one, some constitutions don't have any of those two.  They only have the right to life but the right to life is really present everywhere.  Now that we have our life which has been digitally extended, we also could consider that our right to our integrity of ourselves should be extended also.  But it raises some questions and it has some consequences actually.  One of the first consequences which has already been established by some groups,  and one of the groups is called the APDP, it's an association of French-speaking data protection officers or organizations  like Kniele in France, like the EDUB in Switzerland and many other countries.  They came together and they made a political statement in 2018 saying that personal data are not an object that you can buy and sell.  It is actually part of the human person.  It's part of your personhood and so it has specific rights which are inalienable.  You cannot remove those rights from your data and these rights cannot be sold also.  They cannot be transferred because they are inalienable.  So here when we talk about the integrity of the person, of course if we talk about the physical integrity it's pretty easy to understand.  We have a body and no one is allowed to chop my arm without any reason.  But for the digital space it's a bit different because what is my digital self in the digital realm?  So it is actually my data.  But it's not very well defined exactly.  There are some studies about all the different types of data that we have.  But then it's more like a very large concept.  So now these data are not objects that you can buy and sell like in the US.  They have this Silicon Way approach where they can just buy data, resell it, reuse it against the person.  Or there is the Chinese or the Russian approach which is more like data is part of the common good.  Your personal data is actually not owned by yourself but it's owned by the society.  And then can be used against you for the good of the society.  And this is what we see in China or in Russia.  So here the idea is that the data are part of yourself.  And that's why we can say then that the state through the constitution should protect the integrity of these data  and should not interfere with those as long as it affects your autonomy, your capacity of taking decision.  One very good example is Cambridge and Melitika where organization used personal data  and interfered in the information bubble to change the way of some people of how they would feel  and then to make them vote a certain way.  So this is clearly a manipulation of their digital personhood that affected their digital integrity and it affected their vote.  So from there one of my considerations is that just harvesting data,  if you are starting to get data over people without them being informed and have given consent,  then basically this is already harming the digital integrity of the person.  The fact that you have third parties that are collecting data without you having an interaction with them  could be a state organization or could be a private organization, but this is already not acceptable  without you having given consent.  And also the last consequence that is important is that it comes with a realization that actually no one knows  or no one understands the extent of his personal data.  And this is very important because one of the critics of current,  one of the critics of people who want to fight for their digital rights is,  oh but you just have to be responsible and don't put things on Facebook if you don't,  if you don't want your data to be leaked, just don't put your data there at the first place.  Obviously this is a very bad understanding of how internet is working, so you can argue yes,  but you don't know what metadata is and you don't understand what are the consequences.  It's not just about my poster on Facebook, it's the fact that my friends are using my data  over Facebook, which I don't control, but the reality is actually bigger,  is that no one has full knowledge and full comprehension of the extent of his personal data.  That's just impossible to have, so the whole system must be made taking this into account.  We should be protected wherever our data is, even if we are not aware that the data is somewhere.  And in Switzerland this is really the case right now.  If you want to enforce your right, your right to data access, your right to data deletion and so on,  you really need to know where they are and you need to act precisely.  And this is really limitative.  So breaking the nothing to hide logic, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry.  I think that what that is, a key thing that was always struggling before this right came,  is that a lot of people put digital right in the framework of privacy.  Privacy is a way to live a life on your protected, you know, and enforcing your digital right  is actually not only about making sure that you can hide away and have a private life.  It's just actually a way to make you, to make you self, be able to take freely decision also in the digital realm.  When we talk about digital integrity, it opens up, it breaks this logic of putting people who are fighting for digital rights  just in a place where we suspect them to hide something.  And that's not the case actually.  Most of us, we don't hide anything and we have like normal, boring life like everyone.  But just we want to keep our autonomy and then when we don't want to have, to see algorithm influence our own decision making,  for example, that's one example.  So digital integrity and GDPR, this is a question I get often, is it compatible?  Is it incompatible?  It's a very good example that every time you make a big statement, a big fundamental right,  you need to have laws which come and implement specifics.  And GDPR is exactly this. GDPR is a big law which is implementing specifics about how data has to be managed.  And most of it is actually not bad.  But it has a, so it's a good compliment to the main principle.  But the problem is that it is incompatible within its Article 2.  And the Article 2 of the GDPR is what I call the security black hole.  It's basically that as soon as a state says that there is this kind of security concern around the situation,  then they can collect data for no reason. I mean, they don't have to justify and they can avoid,  they can be excluded from GDPR and just collect all the data they want.  So this has to be removed with time.  It has to be, it has been already reduced a bit by conventions 108 from the Council of Europe.  But basically the idea is that every, if we have a right to digital integrity, then this right is actually,  it imposes itself on the state. So the state should give the example.  That's, this is why we need a right to digital integrity.  The right to digital integrity is basically asking the state to treat his digital citizens the right way.  As free and responsible person who can take their own decisions and they should provide the right tools  to the citizens to be able to have this life and to defend their digital autonomy.  So states should be an example.  And today what we see is that states are not examples.  They are establishing mass surveillance even though they are in democracies.  They are working, they are working with private sector companies like Palantir for example,  which are collecting data and they have the creating systems, very connected systems  between different governments and private companies and they create a system which is called today,  capitalism of surveillance.  So the state should be actually on the side of the citizen and be able to let the citizen protect its own autonomy,  its individual autonomy.  So at the end the right of digital integrity is, should be, I hope, or can be in the future,  the justification for the right to data protection as a whole.  So data protection is only seen as one element to allow people also in the digital sphere to be autonomous.  So now how are we going to implement this?  And this is what we, what's the most interesting is that once we have the right we need to put it somewhere.  And actually there is, so there's two main texts which are proposed.  So it's the Charter of Fundamental Right of the European Union and the Swiss Constitution.  I mean those are two ones which I have somehow I can work on.  So they have a similar article, Article 3.1 and Article 10.2, which says for the Swiss one it says,  every person has a right to personal liberty and in particular to physical and mental integrity and to freedom of movement.  So the idea here is very simple, is to embrace actually our digital society and accept that today  we are only social human beings because we also interact digitally, not only physically.  So we add the digital part of our self in these articles.  So for example the Charter of Fundamental Rights could become, everyone has the right to the respect of his and her physical, mental and digital integrity.  So from there some work has started, it started very slowly a couple of years ago.  It's a long process which has started 10 years ago but in Switzerland we already have three work which are in progress.  And the first one is in Vale. These are state levels, so constitutional levels for people who are not in Switzerland.  So it's a federation so every canton has its own constitutions and they have for some a collection of fundamental rights which is included in their own constitution so they can add them.  So Vale has one specific, is in one specific moment right now because they are renewing their own constitutions so they are rewriting it from scratch.  And they have a whole assembly for this that they voted and there is a commission on fundamental rights that has added this right to digital integrity  as a separate line but in the same paragraph as in the right of life.  And that should be, that is in discussion right now and we'll just comment a bit later on what it triggered, it's very interesting.  Contour of Geneva has also started some work. One of the main local parties has decided to make an initiative to collect signatures but because of coronavirus collecting signatures in the middle of the pandemic is not a very easy task so they sadly decided to cancel it.  But they're going to submit a constitutional law so that's a whole parliamentarian process within the Geneva institutions so that it can go through without a people vote but there will be referendum but there won't be an initiative.  Contour Neuchâtel where I am, there is some work that is being prepared also in that way.  So the debate in Valais and that was interesting, you can find the documentation on their website, I put the link there, it's in French and in German.  But basically they, my message to them was really okay, there is this right to digital integrity and you should try to add this and they really listened to that and they took it.  They put it and unanimously they added, I mean this commission, it's not voted, it has to still be voted by the people of Valais and there's a lot of process still.  But the commission on fundamental rights, they accepted to add this right to digital integrity.  But they came up with other rights and that's really interesting because they tried out several ones.  One of them is every person has a right to control its digital identity and I think in the context of the EID law it's pretty interesting how it came up.  So they put that because they first put the right to digital integrity and then so when they talk about digital identity then they said everyone should be in control.  And in control it's very important because it means that the way you treat certain parties has to be very specific, we have to define that.  But also it added in the same line, it says it has a special right to anonymity within the digital realm.  I think that's very interesting a right, so that's the first occurrence where there's a proposition of the right of anonymity.  There is another right that was proposed but refused by the commission, so there was a minority report on this right,  is that there was a right not to be surveilled, measured or analyzed but for some reason which was not completely, they thought it was a bit too much maybe to do this.  And the third thing is also linked to the right to be disconnected which is also interesting.  Every person is allowed to communicate with authorities without using any specific technology and this is a trend we see right now where a government are pushing people to the digital connection  and it's actually letting a lot of people out and or maybe some people are using those tools but basically are losing the control over those tools that they're using  and they're losing the control in their relationship with their own state.  So if you try to have a state that creates confidence with their citizen but you give them tools that they don't understand right now because they don't have the education,  because they don't have control over the tools, that's not going to increase the overall confidence in the state.  So it's actually not going in the other direction and basically when you think about that every person has a right to digital integrity,  then you think about these things.  This year we added a Wikipedia article in French which the link is on the screen.  It was really an interesting exercise that we did here.  It's a very simple article which goes through a bit of the situation in Switzerland.  The best lesson that we learned from this is that as soon as there's a Wikipedia page then it's a real thing.  Because people, the first thing they will do if you talk about something, they will go on internet and they will search the topic and they will see the first link as a Wikipedia page.  So they talk about something which is right.  I just made one mistake which I didn't know at that time is that we should never use like parenthesis at the end of a link.  It really is very bad for sharing the link.  So the Wikipedia page got some interest and there's already some other external editors on this article which is interesting.  This year and it's just like released a few days ago.  We have the first publication so in the beginning of the year 2020 there was a one day colloquium at the University of Law of Nechapel about the topic.  I was presenting someone from the Valais constitution was presenting and then all the teacher professors from key elements like constitutional law, criminal law,  civil law, international civil law they all presented and they made their own analysis of this new right.  So now we have this booklet which is actually a book with the contribution of all these authors that has been published a couple of weeks ago.  So that's the first legal publication. It's important because now people can start referencing this right and put references in their own work and start to use this as doctrine.  So this is a doctrinal work that we've been doing.  I've been presenting this in going around.  So I was last year at the CCC also I was at the Winter Congress and we recently presented it also at the Internet Governance Forum which is a good place to have outreach.  These are older achievements but I'm still putting them there because they're quite interesting.  SWECO is an association in Switzerland about the digital world and they made a survey in 2019 for all the candidates of the national elections of 2019.  There was a question, we were able to add this question in the survey where they were asked what do you think about a right to digital integrity and there was a very high support.  So even though it was not a topic at that moment and maybe when they saw the question they felt naturally that it was a good thing.  The Greens in Switzerland voted, they agreed up to 99% or 95% and SVOP which is like the most conservative, let's say they agreed up at 55% which is not bad actually.  The Swiss Socialist Party has made in 2015, so that was a long time ago, a paper on internet, a position on the internet and they did it in a way which is pretty interesting.  There's the link also there on the screen. They really made a work and they involved a lot of people from experts in the community to try to find a way to define what is socialism in the age of internet and how their view should be on the internet.  They also integrated, after a proposition that we made, they also integrated the right to digital integrity and they really made it in a way that it's linked to the right to self-determination.  So this is how they see it very well. They understood.  So in terms of future work this year there will be few things happening. So first there is an essay which is going to be published also. So this is more like a political book publication that will be published in April which is explaining a bit the thinking about this.  So it's not legal work like the first one which is more legal analysis and legal critiques, but this is really like a digital essay and thinking, wishful thinking about how it could have an impact on the society.  There's a lot of legal research that is going to start in Neuchâtel University. There is even a new laboratory in the law university about the tech and they're going to take this subject too.  Hopefully we are going to have some initiatives.  So I'm just going to finalize now with the last thing is that, okay, some people say, yeah, great Alexi, I like this and I want to help somehow.  And the idea is actually the first thing that we have to do is keep on building the things that we are building right now actually that protects our digital integrity.  So everything which is based on anonymization, all the decentralized tool, all those new tools that we are thriving, we are working with and we are thriving in, these we need to keep building.  And we can just add this little touch that does it protect my digital integrity? Yes or no.  Myself, I'm working on helping people to build an anonymization network and that's exactly in line with my thinking.  Of course then we can also, whenever, and I hope the next time the digital society has a successful judicial process, they can ask the question, okay, in this case, did we hurt?  Hurt the digital integrity of the people.  It's something that you can take into a legal procedure and ask this question.  Now that there are some doctrine, people, the judges can go and be questioned about this.  Yeah, basically, and of course you can always express yourself and use this term by saying, instead of saying, no, I want to be private.  I don't want people to see me, to see my private information on my social network.  You can say to people who don't understand, who are still in the thematic of saying, oh, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.  You can say, yeah, but it does affect my digital integrity.  It does affect my way I can take a decision.  So it's a different language that you can propose to this.  And obviously, if you want to help support initiatives, local initiatives in Switzerland, if you're in Switzerland, there's a lot of content where you can easily make a local initiative, support them financially or actually help them.  And yeah, that's it.  Thank you, Alexis, very much for your talk and also for your engagement here in this area.  Very interesting. So I'm a little bit lost now so kind of use some problem.  The IOC channel is not working at least not for me.  So but I have two questions.  So the first is probably or maybe I need to eat your one. So it looks to me that in the French part of Switzerland, this initiative is way further grown up.  So is this just by chance or is it because you're more active there or is it because people are more open minded to this kind of topic?  So I've been more active and I had the chance to really engage with scholars in the University of Neuchâtel, in the University of Geneva.  So it has been picked up from there.  And because it has been picked up by scholars, then it had echo in the constitutional hearings in Valais and in Geneva.  So yeah, it was mostly due to the fact that one of the reasons I was there more active so it could spread.  But now it's spreading on its own. So I have to do the same thing in this was German part.  Maybe you can support you there.  So the same thing which came to mind when you were talking more at the beginning of the talk where you were mentioning, for example Cambridge Analytica or this kind of thing.  And such tools are starting to influence your political general, your mind. That's also violating your digital integrity.  And the other hand, even in the non-digital world, so we have advertising for political things on the streets. And then it's of course not, or at least to me of course not a digital integrity.  So the question would then be, where would you see here the border? When would you call it as a violation of the digital integrity and where would you say it's kind of normal add or even part of the healthy political discussion which are needed in a democratic.  So it's all a matter of balance. Okay.  For example, in the physical world, you have propaganda, you have political advertisement. But for example, you're not allowed to have subliminal messages like in the movies, you know, like when they put one frame and to change your mind.  So it is already accepted and that you can put political posters in the streets, but you cannot do subliminal messages. So you see that that's one example where the society made some decisions.  And I think it will be the same for online political publicity. If it's something which is outspoken, which is presented and it's known to be political publicity.  That's probably something that the society will think it's okay. What is not okay is when the people are not aware of the functioning of the algorithm and that the people are using those tools knowing that the people don't understand and are pushing data to change their mindset.  This is different because then you don't have the tools to fight yourself against that because you're inside your bubble and you think that you're seeing the reality and in fact the reality is induced by some political messages that you're seeing.  So I think that's way over the limits that the society should accept. Okay.  Now we should need to find the right balance and the balance will be always at if does a normal person who is not stupid enough strong. Is it facing that kind of publicity? Will he be strong or she be strong enough to understand what it is and still to take his own decision.  That will be the balance. Alright, so you still have no access to the fire state channel. I'd like to thank you again for the talk and for answering at least my question.  Thank you very much. And thank you for everyone who was tuning in. So we are having now a break until eight o'clock Swiss time. So that's almost one hour. And then the next talk will be about bioinformatics.  Thank you.
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