PARIS:  In a world driven by data, notably in the digital format, culture and ethics must be at the heart of any debate on protecting a human's privacy, before seeing it as a technical or legal issue, said the participants at a creative forum here.

Likening the current debate over data privacy and ethics to one on the uses of personal DNA in the 1990s, the participants at a meeting of Forum d' Avignon, a think tank on culture, said every individual has the right to have his personal data protected.

"It is the responsibility of every state to enforce in an ethical framework, regulations in compliance with its culture. Our digital DNA, our privacy and cultural values deserve this ethical dynamics," the forum said after its 7th global meeting this month.

The discussions focused on four issues: Ethics, fairness, transparency of the state and public authorities with regard to sharing of data, and the opening-up of networks, and infrastructures to make towns and cities even smarter.

The forum, which saw interventions from the Indian side by poet, song writer and media expert Amit Khanna and writer Sidharth Bhatia, among others, said a similar debate in the 1990s had resulted in the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome in 1997.