Annual Conference "The Future of the Data Economy

Nowadays, smartphones, apps and social networks are an integral part of our working and private lives. But what do the economic and technical structures behind them look like? How is money earned there, what processes are used - and how does all this affect society? These are the questions that the research association "Forum Privatheit" will be exploring on October 11 and 12, 2018, at its annual conference "The Future of the Data Economy: Design Perspectives between Business Model, Collective Good and Consumer Protection."

The potential of digitization must benefit everyone

From this, Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla, a sociologist at the University of Kassel, derives an initial demand: "We need to find a new balance between safeguarding the common good, economic exploitation opportunities and consumer protection." Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess, a business informatics specialist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, who is organizing the conference together with Lamla, adds, "The innovation opportunities of digitization are immense. But it won't do us any good if Germany doesn't play a role in digital innovations, either economically or socially. Moreover, we have to be careful that the opportunities don't just benefit a few, otherwise we will squander the potential of digitization."

Behavior control puts democracy under pressure

Harvard economist Prof. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff even sees humanity at a historic crossroads: "The problem lies neither in digital technologies as such nor in any particular individual company. Rather, it lies in a novel logic of capital accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. Corporations extract behavioral data from human experience to produce and sell predictive and control potential." The emergence of this behavior control market has far-reaching consequences, he says: "New social inequalities and unknown economic forms of domination are emerging. Established foundations of democracy, such as autonomy and privacy, come under pressure."

Countering centralization with an alliance of alternative networks

Media activist Prof. Dr. Geert Lovink of the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam sees one possible remedy in alternative value creation and income models on the Internet: "At the moment, the main beneficiaries of all the content production by Internet users are those platforms that succeed in positioning themselves as the central authority, rather than the whole of civil society. To counter the trend toward centralization, we need what I call 'federated networks': an alliance of alternative networks."

For such alternatives to be realized, there needs to be sensitized technology developers who are actually capable of developing privacy-friendly systems. But according to business informatics expert Prof. Dr. Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff, they often encounter difficulties within their own companies and organizations. For example, although software engineers consider data protection and privacy to be very important, they are often slowed down by the framework conditions of the data economy when it comes to implementing privacy- and data protection-friendly technology.

Data protection should be seen as an opportunity for the data economy

The fact that the future of the data economy thus requires active political and civil society shaping that changes these framework conditions and does not merely retreat to a merely corrective observer position is a key finding of the conference. "If we want to leverage the potential of digitization, we need to think more about how self-determination must be thought about in the future. Not only individual but also collective self-determination are prerequisites for the long-term preservation of democracy. For this, however, we also need transnational social debates to reach agreement on civilizational standards worldwide," says Lamla. For Hess, there are already good economic design approaches, for example in tax or competition law, but also in data protection law. He is certain: "Anyone who successfully positions interesting digital offerings on the market can also bring their ideas about the protection and use of personal data to the world. Ultimately, it's important to see data protection as an opportunity for the data economy."

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In the Privacy Forum, experts from seven scientific institutions address issues relating to the protection of privacy in an interdisciplinary, critical and independent manner. The project is coordinated by Fraunhofer ISI. Other partners include Fraunhofer SIT, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Scientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the Independent State Center for Data Protection Schleswig-Holstein. The BMBF supports the Privacy Forum in order to stimulate public discourse on the topics of privacy and data protection.

Organization of the annual conference "The Future of the Data Economy":
Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla
Department of Sociological Theory
University of Kassel
Tel.: +49 (0) 561 / 804-2185
E-mail: lamla[at]uni-kassel[dot]de