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Report from the inaugural program of the Salzburg Global Law and Technology Forum now available online

Technology has led to fundamental disruptions across society, commercial sectors, and traditional spheres of governance. While these changes provide ample and exciting opportunities to develop products, systems, and structures designed to optimize public good, they also create new fields and grey areas that raise unprecedented challenges for policy, law, and regulation.

Through its new Law and Technology Forum, Salzburg Global Seminar seeks to create meaningful partnerships and formulate tangible outcomes by encouraging participants to discuss the place of technology in today’s society, and how law and governance structures could improve this status quo. The inaugural program – Privacy, Security, and Ethics in an Asymmetric World – in April 2019 brought together stakeholders from a diverse set of technology companies, along with academics, regulators, and policymakers from around the world to tackle these issues. 

Working as a small group of peers, representing multiple sectors and countries, the discussions in Salzburg enabled participants to foster meaningful and ongoing relationships with stakeholders who may have different perceptions of technology and its role in the world.

Download the report as a PDF

Topics of discussion: 

• Ensuring an ethical underpinning for technological development, consistent with the rule of law and global public good, seeking in particular to balance needs for security and privacy, law enforcement and human rights, and responsibilities for private firms and public institutions to each other and to citizens.
• Resolving specific priority issues and global challenges through a comprehensive and cross-sectoral process within conditions of mutual trust.
• Devising methods to equip rule-makers from judicial, legislative, and executive bodies with technological literacy, including both through facilitating continuing education or mainstreaming technical staff advising and supporting the rule-makers within institutional and legal processes.
• Developing leadership skills and competencies that help to unleash human potential to lead technological change, exploiting existing capabilities and new opportunities.

The takeaways from this inaugural program, together with input from the Advisory Committee, will now inform the future topics of discussion for the Salzburg Global Law and Technology Forum, the next program of which will be held in 2020.