electronic identification - legal aspects of new technologies

The Regulation of the Council of Ministers of
9 March 2020 on Documents Connected with Banking Activities on IT Data
Carriers enters into force on 19 September 2020. This is a good occasion
to discuss the expanded legal significance of the electronic seal.

The new regulation supersedes the prior executive
regulation under Art. 7 of the Polish Banking Law. The noteworthy features
of the new regulation include the systemic consolidation of the terminology
through introduction of concepts consistent with the EU’s eIDAS Regulation (910/2014)
and a direct reference to distributed ledger technology. (I will address the
treatment of this technology in a separate article.)

It appears that inclusion in the new Polish regulation of terminology consistent with the eIDAS Regulation is more than a mere technicality. A closer analysis of the provisions raises the question of whether the regulation in fact expands the legal significance of the electronic seal.

The battle with the coronavirus is dynamically entering another phase.
After the initial shock, we are realising that technology may have a crucial
impact on the rate of return to a somewhat more normal life. This doesn’t mean
just biotech. Solutions keeping the virus under relative control until effective
vaccines reach the market can prove just as important.

With this article, we would like to launch a series of publications on the legal aspects of solutions for supporting the battle with the coronavirus. These solutions are extremely interesting from the conceptual and technological perspective, but also entail numerous legal issues.

An anti-obscenity association issued a proposal for an Act on Protection of Minors against Pornographic Content on 16 December 2019. It has gained the official support of the Family Council, which recommended to the Prime Minister that the proposal be adopted for further legislative work. The Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy announced that work on the bill should conclude in the first half of 2020. The need to restrict children’s access to pornography is obvious, but the proposal has generated much controversy, mainly due to the proposed mechanism for age verification, which may invade internet users’ privacy. The proposal would also impose additional obligations on telecommunications operators, electronic service providers, and payment service providers.

For many people today, a life lived offline can hardly be imagined, but the internet still has many limitations. Access to information and easy communications have become the standard and basis for functioning of the society and the economy—and, it follows, a subject of interest to the law. Nonetheless, we more and more often sense the shortcomings of the current version of the digital world. These include digital exchange of value and universal electronic identification.

Many startups offer their clients big data analysis services based on machine-learning algorithms. The results of such analyses can be of interest to any companies profiling their products or marketing campaigns. But for the analysis to be reliable, it takes data—the more the better. Algorithms using machine learning must have something to learn from. The accuracy of the forecasts subsequently developed for business aims will depend on the scope of the training data fed to them. If the algorithm is limited from the start to analysis of an abridged sample of observations, the risk increases that it will incorrectly group data, overlooking important correlations or causal connections—or see them where they don’t exist. Only training the algorithm on large datasets can minimise the risk of shortcomings in diagnosis and prognosis.

One of the many uses of hash functions is the identification and verification of computer files.

Everyone has experienced having to frantically search for an important document that was saved “somewhere in the computer” but is needed immediately. In such situations, we usually resort to the search function built into the operating system; but in the end, we just have to browse through the files, one at a time, until we find (or not) the right one. But what if we need to find a file among hundreds of thousands of others?