How AI can help to bring more digital sovereignty into everyday consumer life
Who knows exactly what personal data a digital application uses and passes on to third parties? Data protection declarations and general terms and conditions are mostly simply incomprehensible to most people. But artificial intelligence can help to increase transparency for users.
As early as 1983, the Federal Constitutional Court held that in order to be able to act in a self-determined manner with regard to information, consumers* must know “who knows what, when and on what occasion about them”. We are further away than ever from this ideal in view of the data volumes we generate in everyday digital life. In practice, there are numerous obstacles to the exercise of information rights against app providers or platform operators.
Checking, designing, testing: In cooperation with the TU Berlin and the start-up Dilecy, we will develop technical concepts and tools that effectively relieve the burden on consumers. Instead of imposing the task of gathering information on them, we want to make it increasingly automated and as inexpensive as possible. At the same time, we are analyzing data protection concepts with regard to how this can be done in a legally compliant manner and across services.
At the end of a three-year development cycle there is a technical prototype that continuously obtains transparency information and plays it out in various forms: as a plug-in for desktop browsers, smartphones or by means of smart home assistants. In order to think about the consumer policy consequences of the project, a continuous exchange with social actors during the development process is planned.
DaSKITA (Data Sovereignty through AI-based Transparency and Information) is funded by the Federal Ministry of Justice and for Consumer Protection based on a resolution of the German Bundestag.