Legal safeguards for ambient intelligence. Some privacy aspects

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 privacy and data protection legal framework. Current legislation does not always address the threats of privacy sufficiently. The SWAMI consortium tried to envisage a number of legal safeguards addressing 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.