Beyond Profiling: A Different Digital Model
Data, algorithms and artificial intelligence serving people, not profiling. The challenge taken on by European Technology Ethics.
In the digital age, we have accepted a model in which, to use services that are essential to our social, professional and personal lives, we continually surrender data that is collected, analysed, used to profile us and monetised by third parties. As the saying goes: if the service is free, you are the product. But does it really have to be this way? According to European Technology Ethics, the answer may be no. We discuss this with Ugo Piazza, the organisation’s President and Founder, and Eugenio Iorio, the project’s Ethics Lead and Technology Architect.
Are you proposing a return to full individual sovereignty over our data and digital identities?
Ugo Piazza: “European Technology Ethics was founded following approximately three years of research. Our first achievement was an ethical manifesto that people can endorse anonymously, without being tracked or having any of their data collected. It is a way of demonstrating that a different approach is possible. Social media platforms—and, more broadly, the web ecosystem—are controlled by multinational companies with two main objectives: to profile our preferences and to collect data that can be turned into commercially valuable information. We are not opposed to progress or artificial intelligence. On the contrary, we believe technology should become a tool that serves people rather than exploits them.”
Public debate often focuses on the protection of personal data. Your Manifesto, however, appears to raise a deeper issue: protecting individual autonomy. Is this the real challenge?
Eugenio Iorio: “The contemporary digital ecosystem—the infosphere—reduces every individual to a collection of predictive data. This data is used to steer people’s choices through what are known as ‘nudges’, supporting the business models of major technology platforms. Today, we are losing what we call neural sovereignty. We begin from a different set of principles: data belongs to the person who creates it, and the individual mind is inviolable. The inviolability of the mind and the protection of personal data are the two fundamental principles upon which we are building our project.”
The current model has been presented to us as an inevitable price to pay for access to new technologies. But if an alternative exists, how can it be implemented globally?
Ugo Piazza: “The contemporary debate surrounding social media and the internet is based on mistaken assumptions. Some countries want to prohibit children under the age of sixteen from using social media, but that is not enough. Today, social media platforms promote particular social models and encourage people to conform to them. We believe this must be curbed, as it is creating an extremely vulnerable generation. The conscious self is being weakened and increasingly projected onto a virtual self—a much more fragile version of the individual. There is a progressive strategy aimed at diminishing people’s sense of their own value. What does this mean? The weaker the public becomes, the easier it is to control.”
What changes in practical terms under your approach?
Eugenio Iorio: “Our intention is to move away from so-called black boxes and algorithmic opacity towards a system in which users understand the environment they are in and how it operates. Human beings and the relationships between them must be protected, particularly from the perspective of neural sovereignty. In other words, no one should be manipulated.”
Your work is based on the principle of Dynamic Relational Identity, of which you are the leading theorist. What does it mean, and why is it so important?
Eugenio Iorio: “We believe that a person’s digital identity is fundamentally defined through relationships and context. Each user becomes an active participant whose rights and responsibilities demonstrate the distinction between human beings and artificial entities, such as AI agents.”
How can we recognise innovation that genuinely places human beings at its centre?
Ugo Piazza: “Our website is one example. Although websites are legally required to address the use of cookies, we have disabled all non-essential cookies so that no databases of personal information are compiled, and we clearly explain what cookies are. Our ambitious goal is to bring ethical, practical technological products to the market. Technology is the future, and its progress is unstoppable.”