Mireille Hildebrandt – författare

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.

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.

Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agency implied by the emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence – self-governing systems – challenge traditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideas of identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic – yet artificial – systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How ‘distinctively human’ will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense, ‘human’ anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offer for a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law.

Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agency implied by the emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence – self-governing systems – challenge traditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideas of identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic – yet artificial – systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How ‘distinctively human’ will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense, ‘human’ anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offer for a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law.

This book addresses issues on the nexus of freedom of and property in information, while acknowledging that both hiding and exposing information may affect our privacy. It inquires into the physics, the technologies, the business models, the governmental strategies and last but not least the legal frameworks concerning access, organisation and control of information. It debates whether it is in the very nature of information to be either free or monopolized, or both. Analysing upcoming power structures, new types of colonization and attempts to replace legal norms with techno-nudging, this book also presents the idea of an infra-ethics capable of pre-empting our pre-emption. It discusses the interrelations between open access, the hacker ethos, the personal data economy, and freedom of information, highlighting the ephemeral but pivotal role played by information in a data-driven society. This book is a must-read for those working on the contemporary dimensions of freedom of information, data protection, and intellectual property rights.

This book addresses issues on the nexus of freedom of and property in information, while acknowledging that both hiding and exposing information may affect our privacy. It inquires into the physics, the technologies, the business models, the governmental strategies and last but not least the legal frameworks concerning access, organisation and control of information. It debates whether it is in the very nature of information to be either free or monopolized, or both. Analysing upcoming power structures, new types of colonization and attempts to replace legal norms with techno-nudging, this book also presents the idea of an infra-ethics capable of pre-empting our pre-emption. It discusses the interrelations between open access, the hacker ethos, the personal data economy, and freedom of information, highlighting the ephemeral but pivotal role played by information in a data-driven society. This book is a must-read for those working on the contemporary dimensions of freedom of information, data protection, and intellectual property rights.

Leading scholars in law, philosophy, computer science and politics analyse the latest innovations in data science and machine learning, assessing the actual and potential implications of these technologies. They investigate how this affects our understanding of such concepts as agency, epistemology, justice, transparency and democracy, and advocate a precautionary approach that takes the effects of data-driven agency seriously without taking it for granted.

Scholars and students of law, ethics and philosophy, in particular legal, political and democratic theory, will find this book a compelling and invaluable read, as will computer scientists interested in the implications of their own work. It will also prove insightful for academics and activists working on privacy, fairness and anti-discrimination.

Contributors include: J.E. Cohen, G. de Vries, S. Delacroix, P. Dumouchel, C. Ess, M. Garnett, E.H. Gerding, R. Gomer, C. Graber, M. Hildebrandt, C. Maple, K. O''Hara, P. Ohm, m.c. schraefel, D. Stevens, N. van Dijk, M. Veale

Mireille Hildebrandt claims that we are in transit between an information society and a data-driven society, which has far reaching consequences for the world we depend on. She highlights how the pervasive employment of machine-learning technologies that inform so-called ''data-driven agency'' threaten privacy, identity, autonomy, non-discrimination, due process and the presumption of innocence. The author argues how smart technologies undermine, reconfigure and overrule the ends of the law in a constitutional democracy, jeopardizing law as an instrument of justice, legal certainty and the public good. Nevertheless, the book calls on lawyers, computer scientists and civil society not to reject smart technologies, explaining how further engaging these technologies may help to reinvent the effective protection of the Rule of Law.

Academics and researchers interested in the philosophy of law and technology will find this book both discerning and relevant. Practitioners and policy makers in the areas of law, computer science and engineering will benefit from the insight into smart technologies and their impact today.

The focus of this book is on the epistemological and hermeneutic implications of data science and artificial intelligence for democracy and the Rule of Law. How do the normative effects of automated decision systems or the interventions of robotic fellow ‘beings’ compare to the legal effect of written and unwritten law? To investigate these questions the book brings together two disciplinary perspectives rarely combined within the framework of one volume. One starts from the perspective of ‘code and law’ and the other develops from the domain of ‘law and literature’. Integrating original analyses of relevant novels or films, the authors discuss how computational technologies challenge traditional forms of legal thought and affect the regulation of human behavior. Thus, pertinent questions are raised about the theoretical assumptions underlying both scientific and legal practice.