Hogan Lovells whitepaper calls for legal certainty to establish trust in a digital world

Digital Trust is the cornerstone of successful digital adoption. In more and more domains, consumers, governments and businesses rely on algorithms, automated decision-making and complex technologies, whose criteria for trust still need to be defined. However the growing erosion of trustworthiness is limiting the adoption of potential new digital technologies which can only be exploited, if the level of acceptance is high among key stakeholders.

The Hogan Lovells digital trust whitepaper outlines the importance of legal certainty in creating digital trust and provides recommendations for successful digital adoption in sectors such as financial services, transport and healthcare.

Split into 12 chapters, the paper sets out a series of recommendations on:

Digital Identity – exploring the extent to which secure actions, interactions and transactions using digital identity are safe and how to minimise risk.

Digital Property – how existing remedies can be applied to securely own property in a digital life.

Digital Custody – identifying the risk and possible mitigations for institutions seeking to enter the digital asset space to ensure trust in the custody solution.

Digital Payments – analysing the journey for the implementation of large scale digital payments solutions and how digital trust sits at the heart of adoption.

Digital Insurance – reviewing three different pathways which the smart contract insurance industry can grow and mature.

AI Governance – putting forward a suggested model for addressing the increasingly complex set of new rules in a seamless and consistent way.

Cybersecurity – underlining the importance of preparation and response to cyber attacks and what needs to be implemented in the first 24 hours of an incident.

Digital Gaming – enabling actors to create content and upload content within a robust framework that protects IP rights.

Digitizing Employment – embracing AI to perform a range of employment related functions that can influence decision-making.

Digital Sustainability – exploring three possible approaches under which the sustainable operation of data centers will be possible in the future.

Digital Health Care – understanding how the transformation of health care systems can present risk and how digital trust is a crucial consideration.

Digital Transportation – accelerating market acceptance of fully autonomous vehicles and how to achieve commercial success.

Bryony Widdup, partner and co-head of Sustainable Finance and Investment at Hogan Lovells, said: 

"This is a key piece of research on how we can create digital trust across sectors, specialisms and market segments. The need and demand for trustworthy digital products and services is here and governments and the businesses that create and deploy digital technologies will need to commit to strategies and technology developments that meet stakeholder expectations in order to earn trust in the digital world.

“Our recommendations are a basis for continued and sustained engagement with the challenge of greater legal certainty across digital products and services. Current efforts made across multiple jurisdictions are a good starting point but continued dialogue and cross-border collaboration is fundamental to the strength of digital trust.”

The full Whitepaper can be accessed here.