Communications of the ACM

their right to the protection of personal
data.”
The GDPR aims to give individuals
control over their personal data and
to provide a unifying regulation with-
in the EU for international business.
It states data protection rules for
all companies operating in the EU,
whether they are established in the
EU or just operating inside the EU.
This regulation forces controllers of
personal data to shape their organi-
zation and their processing systems
in order to implement the data pro-
tection principles. As already men-
tioned, GDPR is the most advanced
regulation about personal data oper-
ating in the world.

Through its organizations, the scientific community has contributed (at a policy level) to identify problems and establish criteria to develop algorithms and systems that embed ma-chine-learning-fueled autonomous capabilities. In March 2018, the ACM Europe Council, the ACM Europe Policy Committee (EUACM), and Informatics Europe presented a white paper on “When Computers Decide: European Recommendations on Machine-Learned Automated Decision Making.” 2 The report critically analyzes the implications of the increasing adoption of machine learning automated decision making in modern autonomous systems. It concludes with a set of recommendations for policy-makers that concern the technical, ethical, legal, economic, societal, and educational dimensions of the digital society.

DECODE is a consortium of 14
European organizations (munici-
palities, companies, research insti-
tutions, foundations) led by the mu-
nicipality of Barcelona. DECODE is
developing a project, funded by the
European Commission through its
research programs Horizon 2020, 8
whose aim is to empower citizens
to control their personal informa-
tion over the Internet. It provides a
distributed platform and tools that
use blockchain technology with at-
tribute-based cryptography to give
people control of how their data is
accessed and used. DECODE experi-
ments through pilots deployed in
Amsterdam and Barcelona. The pi-
lots focus on the Internet of Things,
collaborative economy and open de-
mocracy. The DECODE project was
selected in response to a call that
stated the following objective: “The
goal is to provide SMEs, social en-
terprises, industries, researchers,
communities and individuals with a
new development platform, which is
intrinsically protective of the digital
sovereignty of European citizens."

Beyond privacy, in particular regarding the potential conflict between user/social ethical principles and autonomous systems decisions, ethical issues insistently emerged in the autonomous cars domain. Indeed, there is no general consensus on which ethical principles (personal ethics settings versus mandatory ethics setting) need to be embedded, and how, in the control software of autonomous vehicles. 9, 10 In 2016, the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructures appointed an ethical committee that produced a recommendation report resulting in 20 ethics rules for automated and connected vehicular traffic. 11 In particular, rules 4 and 6 mention the ethical principle of safeguarding the freedom of individuals to make responsible decisions and the need to balance that with the freedom and safety of others.

Challenges for computer scientists. Responsible computing as defined in the European perspective sets out a number of ambitious challenges for computer scientists.