6 - Tracking People’s Behaviour

Summary

Chapter 6 examines the case of the EU controversy on data protection. In the context of the launch of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of sensitive security and defence areas in EU-funded research, EU policymakers asked ethics experts to issue two opinions on the ethics of information and communication technologies. But as the EGE experts started their work, the Commission also launched the data protection legislative reform; in this context data privacy became the object of a controversy, affecting the role ethics experts played in policy. First, the EGE became a terrain of competition between the various Commission DGs involved in data protection issues. Second, and as the policy debate became increasingly polarised, the EGE’s work was also increasingly perceived as a tool to unlock policy deadlock. The EGE experts calibrated their findings in order to deconstruct the binary positions that had been evoked in the debate and elaborate a more consensual policy narrative. The case brings to light that when policy conflicts intensify, the role of ethics experts shifts from conflict containment to conflict manoeuvring.