Digitalisation and digital rights

Only 47% of Slovenian citizens have above average digital literacy (EU: 56%). We lack ICT experts (3.8% of employment, EU: 4.8%, Sweden 9%) and our companies are trailing in digital technology uptake (19th place). In Finland, 85% of the population, including 72% of elderly, use online government services, in Slovenia, it is 52% and 38% respectively.

In light of a changing geopolitical landscape, we also need to double down on our efforts with regards to digital autonomy and the protection of digital rights - domains where European cooperation is a must, but where Slovenia can also build competences and business opportunities. 

This is especially true for our public administration and public services which could greatly profit from taking inspiration of more digital governments such as Estonia.

Volt Slovenija proposes:

Public Administration

• Make all citizen-facing processes available online with a clear, accessible and harmonised visual identity and step-by-step instructions in multiple languages.

• Ensure that all government offices have a helpdesk (speaking Slovenian/English) to aid citizens completing procedures online with a special focus on the elderly population. 

• Implement parts of Estonia's e-Government initiatives including online identification, a common digital platform to avoid duplication and effort of maintaining data, secure citizen access to their stored data and the possibilities for online voting and paperless governance.

Public Procurement

• Follow the idea of "public money, public code" and favour open-source software similar to the Brazilian law that gave preferences to open-source and built a strong ICT industry. 

• Introduce minimum quotas for Slovenian or European suppliers in public ICT procurement. For mission critical solutions, only Slovenian and European solutions should be considered.

Digital rights

• Make high-speed internet access a basic public service and favour 5G virtualized RAN over hardware-based infrastructure Adopt Finland's model for frequency sharing, that allows leasing of unused frequency bands from primary licence holders.

• Launch an EU initiative to define ownership rights of personal data. Rights to physical property exist (my house, my car, my dog). We need similar rights for digital personal data (my DNA sequence, my health records, etc).

• Extend the initiative to digital property rights to digital works and their usage as training data for AI models and monetisation without consent of the creator.

• Advocate for a common European copyright solution that ensures that Article 13 on content upload filters of the Copyright Directive includes safeguards for user privacy, freedom of expression and other fundamental rights before any upload is judged, blocked or removed.

Consumer protection

• Define consumer rights for software-dependent products (e.g. smartphones) including obligation to maintain a software for 5-10 years, functioning without internet where it should not be required for the basic functioning of the product, refusal of data transfers to vendor/third parties, freedom to modify/repair/jailbreak devices.

• Introduce the right to interact with a human representative for "Core Platform Services" defined in the Digital Markets Act within a reasonable time (eg 48h) following Art. 22 of the GDPR to avoid AI based decisions without possibility of recourse.

• Ensure our right to privacy by banning public and private facial recognition and tracking in public spaces where individuals cannot be expected to provide informed individual consent to such tracking.

Artificial intelligence

• Push a public and openly accessible European LLM (large language model) for European research and enterprises. For Slovenian companies to compete with global actors developing the AI models like ChatGPT, Claude or Bard.

• Introduce legislation that prohibits AI being used against general interest including over-consumption of content/addiction (especially for minors), individualised pricing based on usage-patterns, unsafe work conditions and false comments or reviews.

(version 02-2025)