MOSCOW, September 17 (RAPSI) – The Presidential Human Rights Council is to establish a working group on protection of digital rights of Russian citizens, the body’s Chair Valery Fadeyev informs on Thursday.

The Council had already begun to discuss this issue, Fadeyev said addressing participants of Digital Threats to Human Rights roundtable. As digitalization is underway, it brings a lot of good things people are happy to use; nevertheless, it is well known that any bold technological and technical progress has its negative aspects, which accumulate over time, the rights activist noted.

Among the negative consequences of digitalization Fadeyev named cyberbullying, inadequate protection of personal information, unlawful access to and use of security cameras for video surveillance, and cyber fraud.

President of Kribrum company Igor Ashmanov speaking at this roundtable proposed that digital rights of citizens need to be protected by laws on communications and on personal data, or by a separate digital legal code; such legal instruments needed to be formulated in such a way, he said, so to define and protect human rights in the digital world.

Ashmanov believes citizens are to have the right to protection of their digital identity and safeguards are to be put in place to prevent artificial intelligence to take important decisions affecting people’s lives without human guidance.