By bringing together fundamental rights, economic law, and recent legislation in the areas of digital platforms, data, and AI, this open access book gives a comprehensive picture of the state of play ...in technology regulation in the EU. Risks of regulatory fragmentation are on the rise with ever more legislative instruments becoming applicable to the technology sector. This book explores the prospects and challenges of ensuring legal consistency in a period of transition in which new legislation is being implemented and the interpretation of existing laws is being challenged by the use of data, AI, and platform technologies. The book analyses the legal consistency of technology regulation from three perspectives: (1) the relationship between the EU and the Council of Europe; (2) the relationship among EU regulatory frameworks; and (3) the relationship between EU and Member State law. By covering issues of fundamental rights protection, the free flow of data, consumer protection, competition, and innovation, the book gives a unique and extensive outlook into the state of the art in academic and policy discussions. Unravelling the relationship between legal fields, the book is an essential resource for academics, practitioners and students wishing to understand the increasingly complex landscape of technology regulation in Europe. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
Experts predict that in 5 years’ time, more than 90% of all digital content will be wholly or partially AI generated. In a synthetic society, it may no longer be possible to establish what is real ...and what is not. Central to this open access book are 4 technologies on the frontline of this trend: humanoid robots, deepfakes, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although they are only in their relative infancy, these technologies can already produce content that is indistinguishable from authentic material. The impact of this new reality on democracy, the judicial system, the functioning of the press, as well as on personal relationships will be unprecedented. Van der Sloot describes the technological fundaments of each of those technologies and maps their positive uses for educational purposes as well as for the treatment of patients, for the entertainment and creative industries, and the retail and financial sectors. The book also conceptualises their negative uses for fraud, deception, exploitation, identity-theft and exploitation, and shows their deeper effects on the post-truth society, the privatisation of the public sphere, and the loss of individual autonomy and societal trust. The book evaluates how the current European legal paradigm applies to these technologies, focussing on the right to privacy and data protection, freedom of expression, procedural law, tort law, and the regulation of AI. It discusses regulatory alternatives to solve existing regulatory gaps and shows that there are no easy answers. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
This paper introduces the strategic approach to regulating personal data and the normative foundations of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR'). We explain the genesis of ...the GDPR, which is best understood as an extension and refinement of existing requirements imposed by the 1995 Data Protection Directive; describe the GDPR's approach and provisions; and make predictions about the GDPR's implications. We also highlight where the GDPR takes a different approach than U.S. privacy law. The GDPR is the most consequential regulatory development in information policy in a generation. The GDPR brings personal data into a detailed regulatory regime, that will influence personal data usage worldwide. Understood properly, the GDPR encourages firms to develop information governance frameworks, to in-house data use, and to keep humans in the loop in decision making. Companies with direct relationships with consumers have strategic advantages under the GDPR, compared to third party advertising firms on the internet. To reach these objectives, the GDPR uses big sticks, structural elements that make proving violations easier, but only a few carrots. The GDPR will complicate and restrain some information-intensive business models. But the GDPR will also enable approaches previously impossible under less-protective approaches.
The legal domain distinguishes between different types of data and attaches a different level of protection to each of them. Thus, non-personal data are left largely unregulated, while privacy and ...data protection rules apply to personal data or personal information. There are stricter rules for processing sensitive personal data than for ‘ordinary’ personal data, and metadata or communications data are regulated differently than content communications data. Technological developments challenge these legal categorisations on at least three fronts: First, the lines between the categories are becoming harder to draw and more fluid. Second, working with various categories of data works well when the category a datum or dataset falls into is relatively stable. However, this is less and less so. Third, scholars increasingly question the rationale behind the various legal categorisations. This book assesses to what extent either of these strategies is feasible and to what extent alternative approaches could be developed by combining insights from three fields: technology, practice and law.
With the rise of deepfakes and synthetic media, the question as to what is real and what is not will become increasingly important and politized. Deepfakes can be used to spread fake news, influence ...elections, introduce highly realistic fake evidence in courts and make fake porno movies. Each of these applications potentially has a big impact on society, social relationships, democracy and the rule of law. The question this article shall assess is whether the current regulatory regime suffices to address these potential harms and if not, which additional rules and principles should be adopted. It will discuss several potential amendments to the privacy and data protection regime, limitations to the freedom of expression and ex ante rules on the distribution of use of deepfake-technologies.
The ad hoc judge: A rehabilitation van der Sloot, Bart
Maastricht journal of European and comparative law,
10/2022, Letnik:
29, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is composed of one judge per country that has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). When a case is brought against a country, that ...country has the privilege to have ‘its’ judge take seat ex officio. When the elected judge is unable to sit ex officio, the country may propose an ad hoc judge. Ad hoc judges do not need to pass the normal test of scrutiny as to their competence and impartiality, allowing governments to propose pro-government candidates in politically sensitive cases. Consequently, academic literature, legal practice and even judges of the Court have voiced concerns over the neutrality and quality of ad hoc judges. Changes have been made to the Convention mechanism and further changes are called for to ensure the neutrality of ad hoc judges. By doing statistical analysis, this article suggests that the actual voting behaviour of ad hoc judges may not be so problematic as sometimes suggested. This may be relevant for a decision to introduce further changes to the Convention mechanism and the extent of those potential revisions.
Privacy is predominantly understood as the right to be let alone by others. It protects an individual against intrusions upon the private sphere by governments, companies and fellow citizens and ...focusses on the right to withhold from them access to one's data, body or home. In the data-driven environment, the fact that others may have access to personal information will only be one concern; equally importantly, a person will be confronted with unwanted information about herself. Being frequently confronted with information about one's past, present and future fundamentally challenges an individual's capacity to form and maintain an identity, which depends on her ability to select and prioritise information about herself. This article suggests that the current privacy paradigm could be ameliorated by treating privacy not only as the right to be let alone by others, but in addition, as the right to be let alone by oneself. But before such a right could be introduced, a number of difficult questions need to be answered, such as the scope of the right, its legal-philosophical underpinnings and its relationship vis-à-vis countervailing interests.
In Roe v Wade, a pregnant woman brought a class action against the laws which criminalized abortion, except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother’s life. The fact that the Supreme ...Court accepted the right to abortion as part of the right to privacy was welcomed in the scholarly literature as a new branch of privacy. For example, Roessler differentiates between locational privacy (the privacy of the home), informational privacy (control of personal data), and decisional privacy. In addition, Zucca has identified four types of privacy: ‘physical, decisional, informational, and formational. Physical privacy is a property concept. Decisional privacy concerns a person’s decisions and choices about his private actions. Informational privacy refers to the control of information about oneself. Formational privacy refers to privacy as inferiority’. While traditional theories of privacy focused on privacy as a negative freedom, for example, the right to be let alone or not to be interfered with the privacy of one’s home, other theories had already proposed to ground privacy in the right to control or the right to autonomy. Roe v Wade opened a way to develop a form of privacy that was not only concerned with control, but also with the right to actively steer one’s life and make decisions connected to personal matters.
The Handbook of Privacy Studies is the first book in the world that brings together several disciplinary perspectives on privacy, such as the legal, ethical, medical, informatics and anthropological ...perspective. Privacy is in the news almost every day: mass surveillance by intelligence agencies, the use of social media data for commercial profit and political microtargeting, password hacks and identity theft, new data protection regimes, questionable reuse of medical data, and concerns about how algorithms shape the way we think and decide. This book offers interdisciplinary background information about these developments and how to understand and properly evaluate them. The book is set up for use in interdisciplinary educational programmes. Each chapter provides a structured analysis of the role of privacy within that discipline, its characteristics, themes anddebates, as well as current challenges. Disciplinary approaches are presented in such a way that students and researchers from every scientific background can follow the argumentation and enrich their own understanding of privacy issues.
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