Online Services: Improving Usability and Trust

The growth of online services over the last 15-20 years has been, to say the least, dramatic at every socio-economic level conceivable. Digital technology is changing people’s lives and the EU’s digital strategy aims to make this transformation work for people and businesses. A Europe fit for the digital age is one of the Commission’s six political priorities, aiming to empower people with a new generation of technologies.

However, the widespread everyday dependency on the digital market has had some negative consequences. The usability and trustworthiness of online services and the Internet itself has been undermined by highly visible accounts of cyber-attacks and contraventions of individuals’ data protection and privacy rights.

At one extreme, the constant intrusion of cookie and tracking requests heightens the sense of a surveillance society and, at another, popular myths and speculation surrounding the implications of the use AI are often seen as threatening.

The afternoon’s roundtable address aspects of this broad range of topics that are relevant to both technical and non-technical audiences with a view to starting a conversation.