Niels van Dijk

Property, privacy and personhood in a world of ambient intelligence

Profiling technologies are the facilitating force behind the vision of Ambient Intelligence in which everyday devices are connected and embedded with all kinds of smart characteristics enabling them to take decisions in order to serve our preferences without us being aware of it. These technological practices have considerable impact on the process by which our personhood takes shape and pose threats like discrimination and normalisation. The legal response to these developments should move away from a focus on entitlements to personal data, towards making transparent and controlling the profiling process by which knowledge is produced from these data. The tendency in intellectual property law to commodify information embedded in software and profiles could counteract this shift to transparency and control. These rights obstruct the access and contestation of the design of the code that impacts one’s personhood. This triggers a political discussion about the public nature of this code and forces us to rethink the relations between property, privacy and personhood in the digital age.

A Bump in the Road. Ruling Out Law from Technology

This article discusses the challenge posed by the upcoming field of technoregulation to the study of law and its relation to new technologies. Technoregulation is often hailed as a new legislative tool for the intentional regulation of human behavior by means of technology. Instead of making law redundant, technoregulation could give a new impetus to classical debates in legal theory about the nature of law, by adding questions about the medium of law investigated in the light of the practice turn. If one understands law as a practice, what does this mean for the distinction between medium and content, which seems to underlie much of the debate on technoregulation? Both Hartian practice theory that frames law as a system of ‘incorporeal’ rules and more material approaches that explain law in terms of its mediality are analyzed. These will be discussed in the light of Latour’s studies of the specificities of legal practices and technological practices, which seem to supersede the extremes assumed by both.

Assessing the European Approach to Privacy and Data Protection in Smart Grids. Lessons for Emerging Technologies

In this chapter, we would like to sketch societal challenges posed by smart grids, and in particular those related to surveillance, and – subsequently – to critically as- sess the approach of the European Union (EU) to addressing them. We first use the Dutch example of smart meters roll-out to illustrate that smart grids constitute a complex socio-technical phenomenon, and first and foremost, can be used as a sur- veillance tool (sections 2-3). Second, as the treat of abusive surveillance, to which we limit this chapter, is frequently framed in the language of privacy and personal data protection, we briefly introduce relevant legal frameworks of the EU (section 4) in order to demonstrate how smart grids interfere with these notions (section 5). Third, although the said frameworks solved some issues, they still left a number of open questions. Thus the EU has experimented with adding, on top of them, a “light” regulatory framework for personal data protection in smart grids, of which a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) can be seen as a core element. Having overviewed this development in section 6, we attempt to critically assess it in a sub- sequent section. We analyse the choice of regulatory instruments, their scope, focus, quality and effectiveness, among others. We conclude, in section 8, that the DPIA framework, chosen as the main means to solve the threat of abusive surveillance in smart grids, is rather a missed opportunity.