Europe has spent two decades defending digital rights. It’s now time to defend something even more fundamental: the right to access essential services without first purchasing, carrying and using a smartphone.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney
The moment that convinced me something had gone wrong with Europe’s digital transformation did not involve artificial intelligence, surveillance, or social media. It happened in a bank.
I had gone to my Greek bank to replace an ATM card that was about to expire. After waiting my turn, I explained why I was there, only to be told that I could not be seen because I did not have an appointment. When I asked whether the appointment could simply be made there in person, I was instructed to make it myself using the bank’s smartphone application.
Once you notice this pattern, you begin to see it everywhere.
A few months earlier, I had bought a new pair of German-made headphones. They would not connect to my laptop until I downloaded the manufacturer’s app.
I encountered the same digital barrier in a luxury hotel belonging to one of Europe’s best-known French hotel groups. Expecting to find the room service menu and the usual directory, I instead found a book with page after page of QR codes.
Even something as simple as ordering breakfast had become another trackable digital event. An interaction that was once analog and private was now mediated and recorded through software on a phone.
The same mechanism now runs through transport operators, retailers and governments. Each made its own rational decisions in isolation. Collectively, they’ve produced a society where participation increasingly depends upon a device that citizens must purchase, maintain and replace at their own expense.
There is a tendency in Europe to blame this condition on American Big Tech, as though smartphone dependence were just another consequence of Silicon Valley’s rapacious appetite for data and control. But the companies imposing these requirements are often European. It was a Greek bank, a German manufacturer, and a French hotel group, plus assorted European governments and transport authorities.
American technology companies may provide the operating systems, platforms and devices, but European institutions are choosing to make them compulsory. They are deciding that access to money, mobility, public administration and purchased goods should pass through software on equipment their consumers must supply. Europe cannot credibly present itself as the defender of digital rights while its own companies and governments steadily eliminate the practical ability to live without a smartphone.
What is often described as digital transformation is also a transfer of responsibility. Institutions reduce costs by replacing counters and phone lines with applications and chatbots while citizens provide the hardware, connectivity and labour needed to run it.
Liberal democracy has always rested on the principle that citizens should be able to exercise their rights and participate in economic life without unnecessary barriers imposed by the state or public institutions. Yet we’ve accepted a new prerequisite for participation. Access to our money, transportation, healthcare, government services and increasingly even the products we purchase now depends upon owning, carrying and maintaining a privately purchased smartphone.
The burden falls most heavily on older citizens who increasingly depend on relatives or caregivers for tasks they once managed by themselves. This dependence erodes privacy as well as autonomy, requiring them to share financial or medical details simply because institutions redesigned how these services are accessed. The same is true for people with disabilities, excluded by how access is engineered.
Supporters of this transformation point to convenience, efficiency and security. They’re not wrong, but the problem arises when convenience is no longer a choice and becomes a mandatory condition. Freedom is diminished whenever participation depends on purchasing a certain kind of consumer technology, especially when it is neither provided nor optional.
Europe has spent decades becoming a global leader in digital rights, protecting privacy, and regulating online platforms. Its now time to recognise the Right to Human Access. No person should be required to own, carry, or use a smartphone to access essential public or private services.
Rights are meaningful only when they can be practically exercised. A society that conditions participation on ownership of a private consumer device is confusing technological progress with democratic rights and freedoms.
If democracies are to protect rights, they must also preserve human agency by ensuring that citizens remain free to exercise those rights without first asking permission from a piece of software running on a device they were required to buy.
