In the future systems of ambient intelligence will include decision support systems that will automate the process of discrimination among people that seek entry into environments and to engage in search of the opportunities that are available there. This article argues that these systems must be subject to active and continuous assessment and regulation because of the ways in which they are likely to contribute to economic and social inequality. This regulatory constraint must involve limitations on the collection and use (...) of information about individuals and groups. The article explores a variety of rationales or justifications for establishing these limits. It emphasizes the unintended consequences that flow from the use of these systems as the most compelling rationale. (shrink)

This article develops a more comprehensive understanding of data mining by examining the application of this technology in the marketplace. In addition to exploring the technological issues that arise from the use of these applications, we address some of the social concerns that are too often ignored.As more firms shift more of their business activities to the Web, increasingly more information about consumers and potential customers is being captured in Web server logs. Sophisticated analytic and data mining software tools enable (...) firms to use the data contained in these logs to develop and implement a complex relationship management strategy. Although this new trend in marketing strategy is based on the old idea of relating to customers as individuals, customer relationship management actually rests on segmenting consumers into groups based on profiles developed through a firm's data mining activities. Individuals whose profiles suggest that they are likely to provide a high lifetime value to the firm are served content that will vary from that which is served to consumers with less attractive profiles. (shrink)

An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers From 1971 until 1984 at the College de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended , Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that (...) could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. (shrink)

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a ‘right to explanation’ of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the (...) right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a ‘right to be informed’. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the ‘right not to be subject to automated decision-making’ contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged ‘right to explanation’ stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018. (shrink)

The Snowden revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, starting in 2013, along with the ambiguous complicity of internet companies and the international controversies that followed provide a perfect segue into contemporary conundrums of surveillance and Big Data. Attention has shifted from late C20th information technologies and networks to a C21st focus on data, currently crystallized in “Big Data.” Big Data intensifies certain surveillance trends associated with information technology and networks, and is thus implicated in fresh but fluid configurations. This is (...) considered in three main ways: One, the capacities of Big Data intensify surveillance by expanding interconnected datasets and analytical tools. Existing dynamics of influence, risk-management, and control increase their speed and scope through new techniques, especially predictive analytics. Two, while Big Data appears to be about size, qualitative change in surveillance practices is also perceptible, accenting consequences. Important trends persist – the control motif, faith in technology, public-private synergies, and user-involvement – but the future-orientation increasingly severs surveillance from history and memory and the quest for pattern-discovery is used to justify unprecedented access to data. Three, the ethical turn becomes more urgent as a mode of critique. Modernity's predilection for certain definitions of privacy betrays the subjects of surveillance who, so far from conforming to the abstract, disembodied image of both computing and legal practices, are engaged and embodied users-in-relation whose activities both fuel and foreclose surveillance. (shrink)

In a quiet London office, a software designer muses on the algorithms that will make possible the risk flags to be visualized on the screens of border guards from Heathrow to St Pancras International. There is, he says, ‘real time decision making’ – to detain, to deport, to secondarily question or search – but there is also the ‘offline team who run the analytics and work out the best set of rules’. Writing the code that will decide the association rules (...) between items of data, prosaic and mundane – flight route, payment type, passport – the analysts derive a novel preemptive security measure. This paper proposes the analytic of the data derivative – a visualized risk flag or score drawn from an amalgam of disaggregated fragments of data, inferred from across the gaps between data and projected onto an array of uncertain futures. In contrast to disciplinary and enclosed techniques of collecting data to govern population, the data derivative functions via ‘differential curves of normality’, imagining a range of potential futures through the association rule, thus ‘opening up to let things happen’ ( Foucault 2007 ). In some senses akin to the risk orientation of the financial derivative, itself indifferent to actual underlying people, places or events by virtue of modulated norms, the contemporary security derivative is not centred on who we are, nor even on what our data say about us, but on what can be imagined and inferred about who we might be – on our very proclivities and potentialities. (shrink)

The European Union, a pioneer in gender equality policies, is moving from predominantly attending to gender inequality, towards policies that address multiple inequalities. This article argues that there are tendencies at EU level to assume an unquestioned similarity of inequalities, to fail to address the structural level and to fuel the political competition between inequalities. Based upon a comparison of specific sets of inequalities, this article explores where and how structural and political intersectionality might be relevant. It argues that a (...) ‘one size fits all’ approach to addressing multiple discrimination is based on an incorrect assumption of sameness or equivalence of the social categories connected to inequalities and of the mechanisms and processes that constitute them. Focusing on similarities ignores the differentiated character and dynamics of inequalities. It also overlooks the political dimension of equality goals. Moreover, it has become clear that attention to structural mechanisms and to the role of the state and the private sphere in reproducing inequalities is much needed. The final part of the article presents constructive ideas for a more comprehensive way of addressing multiple inequalities. (shrink)

The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around (...) privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in. (shrink)