Our Goal

For a Truly Trustworthy Digital World

Since the 2000s, digital technology has become the obligatory companion of our daily activities, whether personal, social, or professional.

From a trust perspective, this obligatory companionship gives rise to two major trends that must be distinguished.

1. In their daily use, digital tools tend to inspire trust in users, as shown by the widespread adoption of electronic payment methods, but also, more generally, by the daily connection rate of users, which is constantly rising. There is a kind of spontaneous trust that prevails by default – a first-degree trust granted to everyday digital tools.
2. But things change as soon as we change scale and ask people about the future of digital technology and AI, thus about the future of the digital ecosystem as such, as the following graph shows:

We are therefore witnessing a dual evolution, which is not paradoxical but illustrates two very distinct levels of trust:

• Increasing use of digital objects and tools, whose immediate use presupposes first-degree trust;
• But decreasing trust in the future shaped by this expansion of the digital ecosystem.

Now, if we distinguish these two levels of trust, we are forced to note that they are very unequally taken into account in today's regulations.

We can say that the 1st level is well addressed, well regulated, by all user protection measures, particularly in the banking and financial sector, with strong data security guarantees that, in fact, give users confidence (even if – statistics show – fears of fraud remain significant). Numerous European texts in particular (GDPR, DSA, DMA, DGA, AI Act) legally frame this first level of trust.

However, the situation is entirely different for the 2nd level of trust, which is completely abandoned. There is no normative framework, no declaration, no commitment that allows giving, nurturing, or reinforcing user trust regarding the long-term prospects of the digital world, regarding the trust inspired by the digital ecosystem itself.

We are currently not equipped to ensure this kind of trust. The challenge is therefore to create an ethical framework that does not yet exist.

Such is the purpose of the Declaration which, like the Rights of Man once did, would raise us to the level of the long-term stakes carried by the technologies that are unfolding before our eyes today, but over our heads – thus arousing users' distrust.

It is urgent. We believe that all the initiatives that can be taken today, however meritorious they may be, are destined to remain local, isolated, and ultimately ineffective, if they do not take place within a general ethical framework that alone can anchor them in a global, universal, human perspective.