Ms Margrethe Vestager:

The Deputy is correct. Tonight, many Danes will be singing around bonfires to celebrate midsummer. Luckily, we have stopped burning women on the stake, which was a bad idea. Now it is a much more peaceful thing.

I think it is a European value for a person to have the right to privacy. It is important we make this a right that people know they can enforce. By now, after the introduction of the general data protection regulation, GDPR, many people know they have rights but they find it difficult to know they are able to enforce those rights. We still have some way to go. We are trying to reflect that in new pieces of legislation, such as on artificial intelligence. We use a metaphor of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, where there is a lot of space, there are kinds of artificial intelligence we do not touch at all. However, at the tip of the pyramid we find cases that we would completely prohibit. There is no place in the European Union that a government would put in place a social scoring mechanism that puts citizens under surveillance and that, based on whether they pay their rent, jaywalk or are due a dental appointment - whatever it may be - they are allowed certain privileges or not. We want that to be prohibited.

The second thing we want prohibited, as a matter of principle, is general biometric surveillance in public spaces.

Basically, someone would know where you were at all times. The one exception would be that you could go to a judge and ask to be allowed to use it for a limited period of time, for example, in the search for a missing child or in the case of terrorist or other serious crimes.

Last but not least, we would also want to prohibit the use of subliminal techniques that would make people do something that could be harmful to them or to others. We also try to take this value of privacy into other pieces of legislation so people can see that this is for real.

On the question of algorithms, we have quite a number of initiatives on algorithmic transparency. One of the things would be an obligation for the providers to explain how their algorithm works. We would not necessarily ask for the code itself but we would ask the developer to be able to say how this was actually working because, without that level of explainability, how can we trust that it works without a bias? That is exactly how we would do it because there is a risk of bias if there is no transparency or no explainability with the algorithms being used.

On the question of online advertising, both targeting vulnerable people and also targeting the rest of us, this is where there have been some very heated discussions. One of the areas where we have been a little careful is in the case of smaller businesses with a limited advertising budget because, for them, it can be a good thing to be able to reach potential customers. Businesses with large advertising budgets do not mind so much, and although every business minds about its costs, they can afford to have much broader advertising practices. I am more than willing to discuss how we can, for instance, protect children against targeted advertising, going further than the transparency we are suggesting right now. People should know why they see an ad but I think it is important to be mindful of businesses which have very small advertising budgets because, for them, targeted advertising really makes the difference.