Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn

Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology engages with the rapidly developing computational aspects of our world including data mining, behavioural advertising, iGovernment, profiling for intelligence, customer relationship management, smart search engines, personalized news feeds, and so on in order to consider their implications for the assumptions on which our legal framework has been built. The contributions to this volume focus on the issue of privacy, which is often equated with data privacy and data security, location privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, unobservability, and unlinkability. Here, however, the extent to which predictive and other types of data analytics operate in ways that may or may not violate privacy is rigorously taken up, both technologically and legally, in order to open up new possibilities for considering, and contesting, how we are increasingly being correlated and categorizedin relationship with due process – the right to contest how the profiling systems are categorizing and deciding about us.

While the purpose of this volume was to investigate the effects that these substantive topics are having on societal values such as privacy, autonomy and due process, the authors discussions on the means that allow for governments and corporations to utilise such tools—for example, data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence; and, the moral and ethical implications of these technologies, were well articulated, thought-provoking and fascinating.- Devin Frank for Birkbeck Law Review Volume 2 issue 1 April 2014

Mireille Hildebrandt holds the chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Institute for Computer and Information Sciences (ICIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen, and is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam.Katja de Vries is based in the interdisciplinary Center on Law, Science, Technology andSociety (LSTS) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).