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. (shrink)

The tendency towards an increasing integration of the informational web into our daily physical world (in particular in so-called Ambient Intelligent technologies which combine ideas derived from the field of Ubiquitous Computing, Intelligent User Interfaces and Ubiquitous Communication) is likely to make the development of successful profiling and personalization algorithms, like the ones currently used by internet companies such as Amazon , even more important than it is today. I argue that the way in which we experience ourselves necessarily goes (...) through a moment of technical mediation. Because of this algorithmic profiling that thrives on continuous reconfiguration of identification should not be understood as a supplementary process which maps a pre-established identity that exists independently from the profiling practice. In order to clarify how the experience of one’s identity can become affected by such machine-profiling a theoretical exploration of identity is made (including Agamben’s understanding of an apparatus , Ricoeur’s distinction between idem - and ipse -identity, and Stiegler’s notion of a conjunctive–disjunctive relationship towards retentional apparatuses ). Although it is clear that no specific predictions about the impact of Ambient Intelligent technologies can be made without taking more particulars into account, the theoretical concepts are used to describe three general scenarios about the way wherein the experience of identity might become affected. To conclude, I argue that the experience of one’s identity may affect whether the cases of unwarranted discrimination resulting from ubiquitous differentiations and identifications within an Ambient Intelligent environment, will become a matter of societal concern. (shrink)