Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel prize winner, is known to have said ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future !’ It is therefore rather futile to try and predict the future of data and privacy protection. Instead this article puts forward two conditions (inter alia) which should be met to make sure that privacy and data protection have the same or an even better standing as at present. They are of a regulatory and a non-regulatory nature. On a regulatory level it is suggested that the responsibility for implementing existing legal rules should no longer be restricted to controllers. On a non-regulatory level the key importance of improving media literacy and raising public awareness as a condition for individual autonomy in the digital age is stressed.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, informational self-determination, media literacy, privacy by design, product liability