(SILENCE)
MODERATOR: Our next speaker...
is a professor of philosophical ethics and political philosophy.
She's the co-director...
of the Radboud University's interdisciplinary research hub on digitalisation.
Among other things, she's a member of the European Group of Ethics in Science...
EGE.
She's interested in the growing role of tech businesses in health...
and so-called Googlisation of medical research.
May I have a very warm welcome for Professor Dr. Tamar Sharon.
(APPLAUSE)
And I have some questions for you.
Firstly, you started studying history actually and political theory.
How did you get interested in the human enhancement debate...
and what you call the Googlisation of health?
That's quite a trajectory.
I think I started out studying history and political science and political theory.
I had a subscription...
to New Scientist at the time.
And I was reading about...
all these crazy things...
about science and technology...
which raised really deep, ethical questions.
And I more and more got attracted to those.
I always told myself doing a degree in philosophy is not worthwhile...
because there's no job in it.
I'd better stick to political science and international relations...
but I couldn't help myself, so I was constantly drawn back.
I think that was my entry point to ethics of new science and technology...
and I wrote my dissertation on the human enhancement debate.
I was always interested in particular how technologies...
in the context of health and medicine are disrupting values...
which would act as kind of normative anchor points for what is good to do.
So what is artificial, what is not artificial, what is human, what is machine...
Is there something that triggered this interest?
No, I think it was those really corny New Scientist articles.
Okay. Good, yeah.
So slowly, that's where I shifted towards studying ethics of new technologies.
This was when I was still in Israel. Especially in the health context.
And from there, I started doing research...
which was more empirical and less theoretical of saying:
Well, philosophers are really busy...
with how these technologies might disrupt large, big concepts...
like autonomy and solidarity, but what does that mean to people?
So I did this turn towards what we call empirical ethics and philosophy...
where I started just going out and seeing how people interact with technology.
So i had a big projet on the quantified self...
how people use mobile apps and wearables to track their health...
and trying to see from them what this does, if anything, to their autonomy...
or to their solidarity, etcetera.
And that slowly brought me to the Googlisation of health issue.
MODERATOR: Thank you. And you're a member of EGE...
the European Group on Ethics in Science. What does this group do?
I don't know if anybody here has heard of it.
And how... do you give advices or are you asked for advices?
We're an advisory committee of the European Commission...
where we're 15 experts working on ethics of new science and technology...
where we write up opinions and statements, so these can be solicited or non-solicited...
that give advice to President von der Leyen on various topics.
So we've just finished up, actually, an opinion on democracy and technology...
or democracy in the digital age we've called it...
and it'll be ready at the end of the month.
Some of those findings and discussions...
will find its way back into the talk I'll give today.
But it's a very big document.
I do invite people to take a look at it as soon as it will be out.
That should be at the end of the month. -MODERATOR: Great, thank you.
Professor Dr. Tamar Sharon.
(APPLAUSE)
TAMAR SHARON: Okay, good afternoon. Thank you for having me here.
I'm happy to speak here today on this really important topic.
I'm not a policy studies nor a legal scholar.
As I've already said, I'm a philosopher...
a philosopher of technology.
And you may ask: what does a philosopher have to contribute to this discussion?
I would hope that that would be obvious, but I assume that it's not.
One thing that philosophers are very good at, is problem definition.
I don't have a clicker.
Thanks.
And problem definition, it's crucial, right?
Because without it, we may miss what is actually going on.
Because good problem definition brings to light new risks...
that we should be dealing with.
And because good problem definition also begins pointing towards solutions.
So in my talk, what I'd like to do, is offer a redefinition of big tech expansionism...
and delineate what is at stake with this expansionism...
and discuss also how well our European digital regulatory strategy...
addresses this expansionism.
But first, let's begin with a little philosophy.
There we go.
In the 1980s, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer...
published a very famous book, at least amongst political philosophers...
called Spheres of Justice...
where he puts forward what I think is a very intuitive theory of justice.
According to Walter, society is made up of different spheres.
We have the market sphere, we have the sphere of politics...
we have the sphere of welfare where Walter would put health...
we have family life, education, etcetera.
In liberal societies, argues Walter, we can accept some inequality within spheres.
Some people may be richer than others, like successful entrepreneurs...
some people may have more political power than others...
like the Prime Minister...
and some people may even have more friends and loved ones than others.
In a just society, Walter argues, these inequalities within spheres...
should not be carried over into other spheres.
So advantages which are obtained in one sphere...
should not translate into advantages in another.
So it's not because someone has more money...
that they should get better education or that they should be able to buy votes.
This is a descriptive theory of justice, this isn't to say that it's not happening.
And it's not because someone has more political power...
that they should get better health care...
or have access to better deals, for example, on the real estate market.
Such translations of advantages from one sphere to another...
Walter calls transgressions.
Now, Walter was not busy with digital technologies and platforms...
in his analysis.
But I think we can understand big tech expansionism...
in terms of sphere transgressions...
whereby tech corporations are expanding from their original sphere of activity...
what we might call a sphere of digital goods, the domain of digital...
they're expanding from this original sphere of activity...
into all spheres of society which are undergoing digitalisation today...
which means virtually all spheres of society.
Indeed, in the past decade and increasingly so...
tech corporations have expanded into ever more sectors...
including health, this is the one that I've been focusing on mostly...
but also education...
news provision...
finances...
geopolitics...
science...
agriculture...
and perhaps the last frontier, space exploration.
These are what Walter would call sphere transgressions...
because they are a conversion, a translation of an advantage...
gained in one sphere, here the digital expertise and know-how...
which these actors have quite legitimately gained in their original sphere of activity.
This is being translated, converted into an illegitimate advantage...
in all spheres that undergo digitalisation.
The risk, sticking to Walter's theory of justice, is domination.
That one group of actors comes to dominate not just in one sphere...
but across all spheres, with grave consequences for democracy.
Last year, my research group launched a digital tool...
that visualises these sphere transgressions over time.
We call this the Sphere Transgression Watch.
I won't go into it and play around with it, but please visit it.
This tool allows us to visualise these sphere transgressions.
It tracks the presence of big tech in a number of spheres.
So we have health, we have education, we have public administration...
law, the home, etcetera.
And it allows you to kind of zoom into a specific sphere, say health...
this is a snapshot from health.
Again, this is where we've done most of our research.
And you get a lot of information about different types of initiatives...
these companies have launched in different areas, such as telehealth...
personal health, AI or cloud services.
You can also search what one specific company is doing in any specific sphere.
So this is all companies in health and medicine.
Or you can take a look at what one company has been doing...
in all of these spheres.
So this is all of the companies in all of the spheres.
Again, please take a look and play around with that.
The aim of the tool has been twofold.
We wanted to raise awareness about this phenomenon...
in a kind of simple, tactile, visual way.
But it's also a public archive of information on sphere transgressions...
that we had been collecting already over years...
and that we now hope other researchers can use.
Now, redefining big tech expansionism as sphere transgressions...
allows us to identify new risks.
This is what I said in my introduction and I want to take a closer look at this.
Before that, the new risks, we have a very obvious set of risks...
that big tech expansionism into new spheres poses...
and this is of course data protection risks, and more specifically, privacy.
What happens when these companies...
given what we know about their dubious business models...
start handling health and medical data or data on children in schools.
And we've already seen a number of ways of how this can go wrong.
These are a couple examples.
And so data protection and privacy infringements in particular...
have been really at the top of the list of what to look at...
when we're looking into how these companies...
start moving into these new sectors.
But privacy only scratches the surface...
and that's because the business models at work in tech expansionism...
are no longer only about hoarding personal data and selling it to advertisers.
From the research we've been doing, we're seeing that this business model...
which we know well from search and social media...
is not necessarily what is driving big tech's entrance into these new sectors.
If we look, for example, at the medical sector...
many of the initiatives of these companies...
are developing from apps for mobile health to AI for disease risk prediction...
to health record management.
These don't require necessarily using data in ways that are privacy unfriendly.
And some of them don't require using data at all.
So take the Apple ResearchKit, for example.
This is software that Apple launched in 2014.
It allows medical researchers to carry out clinical studies on an iPhone...
using the iPhone to collect data.
And medical researchers are quite excited about this for good reasons.
I would call this a sphere transgression into the sphere of medical research.
Now, importantly, I won't get into the benefits of this initiative...
but it's also privacy-friendly software.
So the data that the phones collect...
either go straight to the researchers involved...
in one of these Apple ResearchKit studies...
or they go to a data repository where they could be accessed.
Not to Apple, as far as I understand.
What's important here, is that for Apple, this is fine.
This is not a problem, it's not a bug.
Because Apple doesn't need to see, control, analyse...
or in any way handle the data...
that's collected in the context of these studies...
in order for the ResearchKit as software...
or the iPhone as hardware to be a success...
to be necessary passage points for doing remote clinical studies...
which is really the way for clinical research in the future.
Another good example of this...
you'll remember that with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic...
there was a lot of discussion about how to develop digital contact tracing...
which would be privacy-preserving.
And that in a rare collaboration, Google and Apple launched an API...
on which contact tracing apps could run.
This I would call a sphere transgression into the sphere of public health.
Now, this API complied with many, if not all of the stringent privacy criteria...
that some of the world's leading privacy experts had identified.
Most importantly, decentralized data storage...
that was one of the sticking points around this.
And for this reason, the gapple API was hailed by...
hailed as a privacy-friendly solution...
which many privacy experts and many countries...
immediately applauded and adopted.
Now, my point here is not to downplay in any way privacy and data protection risks...
but it's to say that in these cases, and there are I think many of them...
privacy and data protection are not necessarily at stake.
And even worse, our focus on privacy and data protection may actually be enabling...
these companies' increased involvement in these new sectors...
rather than hindering it.
So privacy may be beginning to act as a smokescreen for big tech expansionism.
So we need to think very carefully...
about what happens when we see the risks of this phenonemon...
through, I would say, solely the lens of data protection.
This is too narrow.
And this is where a redefinition of this phenomenon...
in terms of sphere transgressions is helpful...
as it sheds light on a number of other risks which aren't captured by data protection.
So in our research on sphere transgressions...
we've identified quite a few of these risks.
I cluster them here in four categories of risks.
First of all what we call non-equitable returns.
Not only data has monetary value.
While these companies may not be trading data, commercialising it...
in the business model we know well from search and social media...
they are using domain-specific data to develop algorithms...
which are proprietary and which can be monetised...
often after an initial period of free access.
In the Google DeepMind NHS collaboration, for example...
DeepMind was using patient data from several hospitals to develop an app...
they called it Streams...
to help medical professionals identify patients at risk of acute kidney injury.
The hospitals which were part of this agreement...
were able to use Streams for free for a period of five years...
following which the hospitals would then need to pay.
This is a business model we know well, actually...
from areas like drug development...
whereby pharma companies get to create patents...
as the result of research carried out in part using public funding.
Similarly, what we have here is public data...
from public institutions like hospitals or research institutions or schools...
being used, not sold to advertisers...
but being used to develop proprietary algorithms.
This is not a good deal.
This is what the economist Mariana Mazzucato calls...
a model of the public sector paying twice.
The public sector pays once for the generation of data sets...
for investing in these public data sets...
and a second time for buying back the algorithms and services...
that have been developed using that data.
(SILENCE)
Second, the more involved tech corporations become in public sectors...
the greater role they'll begin to play in decisive processes...
processes like agenda-setting.
One example of this is Alphabet's by now long-standing interest...
in an investment in Parkinson's disease.
So they've developed a wearable, for example...
for clinical and diagnostic research that's being used also in the Netherlands.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, has set up a philanthropic foundation...
through which he's funded over 1 billion dollars in Parkinson's research.
They've reallly had this interest in Parkinson's for quite some time.
Sergey Brin, by the way, has been open about the fact...
that he has a rare form of Parkinson's disease running in his family...
and this is why he's so interested in Parkinson's research.
Now, we might ask, what's wrong with this?
Parkinson's is an incurable disease...
that afflicts some 10 million people worldwide.
Yes, that's true, but philanthropy has been shown to distort funding landscapes.
And while Brin's philanthropy may be of apparent value to global health...
I'm not contesting that...
we also know that many Silicon Valley tycoons...
are actively investing in things like life extension and anti-aging.
The value here to global health, I think, is a lot more questionable.
To make my point clear, in strong democracies...
research agenda-setting should be the outcome...
of some form of public deliberation...
where the interests of all and the vulnerabilities of the weakest...
are taken into consideration.
(SILENCE)
The third cluster of risks we call reshaping critical sectors.
Now, the more these companies push into these new spheres of society...
we should also expect to see what we can call epistemic trespassing...
or clashes of expertise between these tech experts and domain experts...
if they're medical researchers or teachers.
And these can have an effect of reshaping a sphere in the longer term...
in line with the interests and norms and principles of tech experts...
if they went out in this clash.
Remember my mention of the API that Google and Apple developed...
for contact tracing?
One of the conditions for using this API was that apps be decentralised.
I mentioned this quickly.
Now, decentralisation is good for privacy, but it's not the best thing in a pandemic...
where you might want more oversights and supervision of data.
For these reasons, at the time of these discussions...
some public health officials and epidemiologists...
were actually in favour of centralised apps.
And I think quite a few of you know that at the time...
actually many countries had already begun developing centralised apps...
if that's Germany or Norway or France or the UK.
I'm not weighing in here on what's better, decentralisation or centralisation...
but my point is that there was a clash of expertise here and authority...
in which Google and Apple won.
They got to determine over and above some public health experts...
domain experts, what digital contact tracing...
a quite large-scale public health intervention, would look like.
(SILENCE)
Something similar is taking place in the agricultural sector...
and a focus on what's called precision agriculture.
I'm referring here, I've not done any of this work in agriculture...
it's new to me, so I'm referring to the work, which is fascinating, of Kelly Bronson.
She explains that precision agriculture, which big tech is also moving into...
is based on data sets collected on farms and from the environment...
but that these data sets are not representative of all types of farming.
They're biased, like we know about other data sets.
They include data on a quite narrow selection of crops, actually.
Crops such as corn, canola and soy, which grow on large, capital-intensive farms.
Left out of these data sets are crops grown by smaller, peasant farms...
which actually dominate globally and which tend to be more biodiverse.
As Bronson argues...
in this way, precision agriculture favours the crops of large industrial farms...
with a longer-term effect of reshaping the sphere of agriculture...
by the way in ways which have negative impacts for climate change...
because they're favouring industrial farming.
So what we have in these examples...
is what we call sometimes technosolutionism...
by which the original practices and goods of a sphere...
be this food production or public health measures...
come to be redefined as problems that can be solved by a technology.
And this can have negative effects on a sphere...
on the original aims of these public sectors.
(SILENCE)
Finally, a last cluster of risks involves a growing dependency on tech firms...
for the provision of basic goods...
goods such as health and medecine, or education or public services.
As other critical data scholars have pointed out...
it's misleading to see the products and services offered by these companies...
as stand-alones.
They're part of a suite of hardware, software, apps, cloud...
and operating systems which provide an infrastructure.
The computational infrastructure...
that all sectors that are undergoing digitalisation...
that is basically all of society, is becoming dependent on.
Again, the digital contact tracing API is a telltale example...
of just how dependent our daily lives have become...
on these computational infrastructures...
and how this can affect a sector such as public health.
Google and Apple's almost complete monopoly...
over smartphone operating systems...
meant that the very attempt to automate contact tracing...
put public health authorities and governments at the mercy...
of Google and Apple's criteria.
But we've also seen this happening in education.
During the lockdowns, I live in the Netherlands...
my son's primary school immediately moved to Google Classroom...
no questions asked.
And recently, Dutch universities have migrated to Microsoft 365.
If we focus only on data protection and privacy here...
we're missing out on other important points.
When it comes to universities, for example...
there's a question of autonomy that needs to be asked...
of academic independence, of pedagogical autonomy...
and of how public a public sector remains...
when it's dependent on private infrastructure for its proper functioning.
Now, luckily, Europe has a lot more in its regulatory toolkit than data protection...
for addressing big tech expansionism.
As all of you here well know...
the EU has recently developed a series of ambitous new legislative proposals...
to do this, these were already mentioned.
So in addition to the GDPR, we now also have coming out...
in some form or another or at some point or another...
we have the AI Act, the Digital Services Act...
the Digital Market Act, the Data Governance Act, the Data Act...
and the European Health Data Space.
With a colleague of mine, Raphaël Gellert...
there's a missing T on his name, I'm sorry, Raphaël...
we have sought to analyse if these instruments can address...
the risks of sphere transgression that I've mentioned.
This is in a paper which is currently under review.
And I'd like to briefly sketch a few highlights from our findings here.
One important caveat, Raphaël is the legal scholar in our collaboration.
So I will do my best to present his analysis, but it's only very brief.
So if we look at the first cluster of risks of non-equitable returns to the public sector...
I've already hinted that data protection doesn't do much to address this.
A good example of this is the European Health Data Space.
One of the ambitions of this new proposal is to facilitate the reuse of health data...
provided by European citizens and health providers...
for research and innovation.
In this context, access to the European Health Data Space...
by tech companies seeking to develop AI-based medical decision support tools...
is actually stated as one of the aims of the EHDS by the Commission itself.
So this is taken, I don't know if you can read this example well...
but this is from the questions and answers website that they've offered.
And I think really telling in this regard...
is that a few of the tech giants recently reacted...
this isn't recent, this is from last year.
They reacted very positively to the proposal.
This is from the first public consultation.
You can see the statements made by Microsoft and Huawei...
who are really pretty excited about the EHDS.
I would be too if I was a big tech actor.
Now, the authors of the EHDS are of course well aware...
that inviting tech corporations into the Space is risky.
And they've made very clear that access to the Space...
must be in full compliance with the GDPR.
All good, I would say on that front.
But while this may effectively address risks...
associated with third-party sharing of these data...
it leaves unanswered the question of how any profits generated by industry...
will flow back to EU citizens and health providers.
It in no way addresses the risk of non-equitable returns.
On the contrary, I think it increases it.
Other proposed instruments also seem unhelpful...
for addressing this risk of non-equitable returns.
It's not addressed by the AI Act, the DSA also remains silent on this...
nor is the DMA really concerned...
with the way in which businesses develop their algorithms or software.
So that's for our first risk, non-equitable returns.
If we look at the risks of agenda-setting and a reshaping of critical sectors...
I put these together here, I think we see something similar.
One of the main goals of the EU digital regulatory strategy...
is to prevent anti-competitive digital markets.
In this sense, it aims to avoid exactly the type of dominance...
based on personal interests in the type of philanthropy...
that we see with some of the tech leaders...
pushing into public sector, certainly in health.
However, it's very questionable whether this will be helpful...
to counter the epistemic trespassing or the technosolutionism...
that accompanies sphere transgressions...
and which can contribute to a profound reshaping of sectors.
Indeed, ensuring that personal data are processed fairly...
that only safe AI systems are placed on the market...
or that illegal content is not shared online...
will not address the issue of a reshaping of traditional goods.
I gave the examples of public health measures or food production.
It will not address the question of reshaping of these goods...
into computationally optimisable problems.
The most relevant instrument in this regard is probably the Digital Markets Act...
given its goal to ensure a fair and competitive market...
and thus to avoid dominant market positions.
Yet, here too we can question if avoiding market dominance...
will do much to address how spheres may be reshaped by big tech expansionism.
So the fact that we would have many Googles and Apples...
rather than just one or two of them competing in healthcare...
would not prevent healthcare from being redefined...
as a computational good which could then be fought over in a market.
The Data Act also striving for fairer markets...
can similarly reinforce this problem...
while the Data Governance Act, which encourages the sharing of data...
could lead to actually more epistemic trespassing...
under the guise of progress and innovation in the general interest.
When it comes to our last cluster of risks, new dependencies...
as already mentioned, the GDPR may be limited...
when the business model is not about monetising personal data...
but about the growth of computational infrastructure...
on which certain sectors and subsectors will run.
The DSA and the DMA are probably the most relevant instruments here.
However, here too, these initiatives may fall short.
I think this requires some much better analysis than I can offer.
So the DSA provides for more accountability and responsibilisation...
of online platforms, for example, through provisions on content moderation...
but it has little to say about infrastructural power.
It has little to say about the very desirability of platforms...
being responsible for these services.
And while the DMA is concerned with gatekeeping issues...
which can be seen as a means of addressing monopolistic situations...
in digital markets...
instead of focusing on something like public utility...
which could lead to further reaching regulatory measures...
such as preventing online platforms from accessing certain markets...
it adopts a competition law approach...
and it's, we might say, vaguer and less far-reaching goal...
of fair and competitive markets.
In sum, our analysis shows that these new legal instruments...
may not properly address the risks of big tech expansionism...
when these are redefined or when these are understood as sphere transgressions.
And this problem, I'm almost sorry to say...
because I'm a philosopher looking a bit from the outside onto this...
but this problem may be inherent to Europe's digital regulatory strategy.
Because we can see this strategy as being focused on a two-pronged approach.
At least that's how I see it.
On the one hand we have a focus on data protection...
as a means of protecting fundamental rights.
And on the other hand, we have the development of fair digital markets.
Now, concerning the first...
data protection can only be a guarantor of fundamental rights...
when the collection of personal data is actually at stake.
But as I've argued, this is not necessarily the case...
when big tech is expanding into new sectors...
where this expansion can be data protection compliant...
and still raise other risks.
Concerning the second focus on fair markets...
this risk's promoting a view of sectors such as healthcare and education...
which distribute basic social goods as markets.
The good governance of which requires only fair competition.
This approach may actually increase opportunities of sphere transgressions...
rather than block them.
So, this means that more needs to be done if we want to contain big tech expansionism.
I've got the five minute signal, so I'm going to conclude.
(SILENCE)
I don't have ready-made solutions.
A lot of this work went into redefining the problem...
identifying the risks and trying to see if what we have can help us.
But I'd like to quickly suggest a few recommendations...
which I hope maybe we can discuss on the panels.
Some of these are also recommendations which we've outlined...
in the European Group on Ethics' opinion on democracy and the digital age...
which I mentioned.
(SILENCE)
First of all, and I'm not the only person to say this...
but I want to stress it again, we need to lay down proper conditions...
for how big tech can collaborate with the public sector.
For example, specifying how profits that are generated by products they develop...
using publicly funded data sets flow back to the public sector.
I think we might need increased regulation for socioeconomic rights.
The fundamental rights that data protection and other proposed instruments...
seek to protect, such as freedom of speech and information...
non-discrimination, autonomy, etcetera.
These are all extremely important, but they may not encompass...
precisely those fundamental rights...
which are mostly at stake in sphere transgressions...
such as the right to health, the right to education...
to housing or employment.
I know from my legal colleagues...
that these rights are notoriously difficult to legislate for and to regulate...
but they may very well be more attuned to the risks...
that are being generated by big tech expansionism...
so we need to pay attention to them.
Next, we should decouple digitalisation from marketisation.
Each of these phenomena brings with it its own risks...
but when they go hand in hand, as they typically do today...
this can be disastrous.
We need to pull them apart.
For example, by providing more structural funding for public sector digital innovation...
which can offer non-commercial alternatives...
that are aligned with public value.
This is something we're doing at my research center in Radboud University.
This would also help ensure that a transformation...
of traditional social goods like health or public health measures...
it would ensure that their transformation into computational goods...
which may be okay...
at least would preclude them from becoming market goods.
So my point is that we need to have a discussion...
about what digitalisation does to practices and social goods in spheres...
and what marketisation does.
These are different types of risks, and they tend to be clumped together...
while the phenomenon is clumped together.
Finally, while regulation currently focuses on the fundamental rights of individuals...
data subjects and protecting fair markets...
I think the conceptual framework of sphere transgressions...
calls for an additional unit of protection, spheres...
and begs the question of what would it take to protect spheres.
What we need here, is to be attuned to how values, norms and practices...
imported from the sphere of the market on the one hand...
and from the sphere of digital goods on the other...
can compete with and crowd out those values and norms...
which have traditionally organised our public sectors.
Values such as care and empathy in the medical sector...
or pedagogical autonomy and academic integrity in the educational sector.
These are also public values and I miss them in the debate on public values.
Above all, I would say, if what we want to do is protect public values...
is to protect the publicness...
the most defining value of all of these sectors...
from big tech expansionism, but maybe from digitalisation in general.
Thank you for listening.
(APPLAUSE)
MODERATOR: Thank you for that. Are there any questions?
We have a question online, that's great.
(UNINTELLIGIBLE QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE)
TAMAR SHARON: I can name four of them.
I think the easiest one and the most implementable one, sorry...
I think maybe the easiest, more immediate or most implementable one is the first one.
So really to take a better look at our public-private partnerships...
the collaborations that are being struck up with these tech actors...
and just getting the conditions right.
I mean, we're getting such a bad deal as the public sector.
You do not need to be an economist to see this.
I think we're waking up to this a little bit...
when it comes to now, discussions on ChatGPT...
and what is the data that goes into...
and how much work goes into that when a company ends up profiting?
So we might be waking up to it a little bit more...
but I don't think that's a very difficult thing to do.
We need to have a bit more confidence that as the public, or as public sectors...
we should be calling the shots of how these collaborations take place...
and not the other way around, because they need these data sets.
So we have something very valuable to offer...
and we're giving it away a little bit too easily.
Thank you very much.
One more question.
VAN HUFFELEN: Are you also basically saying...
that market ordering or more economic regulation is needed?
Because we've been talking about more like regulation in terms of privacy...
and so on and so forth...
but you are talking far more, I think, about economic regulation.
Is that true or no?
Yeah, thanks.
I think economic regulation is one way to address this...
so that would be the first issue, for example...
about procurements and public-private partnerships.
But I would be wary of going too far there...
because I think a lot is delegated in a sense to fairer competition...
which has the result, I think, of reframing these public sectors as markets...
which they are not.
And if we just get the competition right, then we will have solved this.
Fairness should be understood...
as something much broader than market fairness...
so it tends to get reduced in these discussions.
But still, yes, so focus on data protection and privacy...
focus on fair competition or good competition...
but also this other issue about the publicness of the public sectors...
about protecting these spheres...
needs to find its way, I think, into regulation and legislation.
MODERATOR: Any more questions?
No? I see one question there.
Yeah. Sorry, thank you.
MAN: Hi, thank you. It's very interesting.
I see problems when you try to protect your sphere.
Because if we do procurement, we always have a European tender.
So companies just can buy us...
because they say: well, okay, you don't have to pay too much.
And cost is always one of the most important things in when you tender...
when you do a procurement.
Do you have any idea how we can deal with that?
(SILENCE)
TAMAR SHARON: Thank you.
I'm not sure I understand entirely.
My thoughts are that in the procurements, in the tenders as well...
we need to lay down some conditions.
So we can have all kinds of conditions that profits that are made are taxed...
that somehow they flow back to the public sector...
that some of them are invested in environmental issues, etcetera.
You could write down any kind of condition you want into procurements and tenders.
I think that's the basic model we need.
MODERATOR: Where should we decide what should be in such contracts?
TAMAR SHARON: Where should we decide? Who should decide.
I'm not sure. I don't know very well how these procurements also take place.
This isn't my field of expertise.
But there needs to be discussion about what should be in these contracts...
because clearly they affect much more than the exact initiative which is at stake.
MODERATOR: But would you say the EU level...
would be the most suitable level to do that?
I mean, ideally, yes, EU regulation...
but if these are collaborations that are taking place...
for example, between a university hospital in the Netherlands...
and one of these companies...
it would be good that the Netherlands had these conditions as well.
If they can be aligned, even better.
I'm not sure where they should begin. I'd leave this up to the policy makers...
if it's more bottom-up or top-down in relation to the EU.
MODERATOR: Great, thank you. There was one more online question, I think?
Ah, great.
Let's, for the sake of time, go to the next speaker.
Thank you, Tamar Sharon.
(APPLAUSE)
(SILENCE)