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Tech Horizons report 2025

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Contents

Executive summary

As the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) works to build public trust by ensuring organisations process personal data responsibly. Our aim is to empower people to share their information securely while benefiting from technological innovation. 

By identifying early the privacy and data protection implications of emerging technologies, we can provide timely regulatory advice and support innovators to embed safeguards during the design phase. This third edition of Tech Horizons focuses on four technologies poised to significantly affect society, the economy and information rights in the next two – seven years:  

  • Connected transport: the convergence of technologies that is transforming how vehicles operate and interact with their environment and the people they are carrying. 
  • Quantum sensing and imaging, which offer new or radically improved capabilities compared with existing sensors and imaging technology. We focus on use cases in healthcare and medical research. 
  • Digital diagnostics, therapeutics and healthcare infrastructure, such as smart pills, digital twins and AI-assisted diagnosis. 
  • Synthetic media and its identification and detection: content that has been wholly or partially generated using AI/machine learning technologies (such as images, videos and audio) and how it is identified. 

These four technologies present unique opportunities, offering potential benefits to the environment and people’s health, wellbeing and mobility.  However, some of the trends we highlighted in previous Tech Horizons reports continue to apply to these technologies.

  • Emerging technologies are revealing novel types of information about people, from brain patterns to driving fatigue. Organisations developing these technologies must build in appropriate safeguards to ensure data protection by design and by default.
  • Many new technologies collect and process increasingly large amounts of personal information. The amount of information being collected and the complexity of its processing increase people’s difficulty in understanding how organisations are using their information. This makes it important that organisations can explain what information they are collecting, how they are using it and why.
  • New technologies are being developed and used by an ever-wider range of parties, leading to lack of transparency and accountability. As this report shows, the increasing number of innovators developing and interacting with new technologies creates complex networks. This makes it harder for people to understand who is processing their information and how they can exercise their information rights.

Many organisations continue to build data protection by design into their innovations. Others may need guidance, or to work with the regulator, to consider how they can engineer privacy into their ideas. 

We will address issues proactively as these technologies mature and our role in regulating them develops. We will:  

  • involve the public in decisions about how we, as a regulator, address the risks and benefits these innovations may present;
  • continue to invite innovators to work with our Regulatory Sandbox to engineer data protection into these technologies from the outset, focusing on the most innovative moves;  
  • share further insights on priority technologies by developing in-depth Tech Futures reports, such as those on neurotechnologies, quantum technologies and genomics;    
  • continue to work closely with our partners at the Digital Regulation Collaboration Forum (DRCF) to act on shared regulatory challenges and opportunities; and 
  • keep scanning the horizon for developments that require our immediate attention and possible intervention.