Category: Data Privacy

Alienation, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Capital, Data Privacy, Ecology, History, Identity, Markets, neoliberalism, Philosophy, political philosophy, Technology

Galadriel’s Inversion
Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel from the Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Dir. Peter Jackson, 2001)

On the day when Apple are supposed to be launching a new iPhone with facial scanning capability, the Guardian has delightfully timed a piece warning of the dangers of the technology. Its functions potentially extend to predicting sexual orientation, political disposition, or nefarious intent. What secrets can remain in the face of this extraordinary power! Indeed, it’s two years ago since I heard Martin Geddes talking about people continuing to wear face masks in Hong Kong not because of the smog, but to avoid facial scanning technologies deployed by an overbearing security apparatus. There’s no hiding from the data, no forgetting.

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Artificial Intelligence, constitution, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Ethics, internet, Philosophy, political philosophy

The Temper of the Machine

DSC_0068 cropped
Temper – Tempus – Temporal: Machines are clocks, but they have no temper.

I had the pleasure this week of addressing the Royal Irish Academy on the subject of Digital Citizenship, which, rather than addressing the narrow construct of person-state relationship, instead took in a broad sweep of life in the digital world. Part of a series themed around the constitution, it focused on issues of growing up a teenager in the digital world, data protection (there were a lot of lawyers in the room, not least my fellow presenter Oisín Tobin of Mason Hayes & Curran), privacy, artificial intelligence and the politics of all that. In two hours, it was a hurried skip across disciplines and dystopias, which illustrated in equal measure the interest and enthusiasm people have for addressing the issue (there was barely a seat left in the hall), and the strange paucity (it seems to me, at least) of opportunities that there are to pursue in particular the ethical, policy, and political implications of our digital lives. Convened by Dr John Morrison, the Academy Chair of the Ethical, Political, Legal and Philsophical Committee, and expertly chaired by Dr Noreen O’Carroll, perhaps this is the beginning of an attempt to address that.

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Big Data, constitution, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Democracy, Identity, law, Philosophy, political philosophy, science fiction, Uncategorized

Algorithmic Governance and its Discontents

AG Workshop
Dr Rónán Kennedy Chairs a session at the Algorithmic Governance workshop at NUI Galway

I had the privilege to participate in a workshop on algorithmic governance this past Friday at my alma mater, the National University of Ireland, Galway, under the supervision of Dr Rónán Kennedy and Dr John Danaher of the Law Faculty. and co-funded by the Colleges of Business and Public Policy. It’s part of a wider program of research grandly titled ‘Algocracy and the Transhumanist Project‘, which promises to tread some fascinating pathways. Comprehensive synopses of the event have already been published by Dr Danaher and one of the speakers Dr Muki Haklay, so I won’t re-do their work, but instead refer to one of the particularly interesting themes that emerged from the work.

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Big Data, Capital, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Google, Informal Economy, internet, Karl Marx, law, Multi-National Corporation, Rule of Law, social networks

The Data Commodity: Fetish or Fiction?

Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School

Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘Big Other’ and ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ as Future Economic Models

Shoshana Zuboff’s recently published article on what she has termed Information Civilization is a compact and helpful analysis of the kind of internet economies that are emerging in the early twenty-first century. This blog post is a commentary on that text. She takes Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian as her foil, referencing his two articles Computer Mediated Transactions (2010) and Beyond Big Data (2013).

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Data Privacy, Data Protection, Iceland, internet, law, MNC, Scope

Data Protection Régimes

data protectionThe Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) recently doubled its budget, and is busy hiring and building capability.  It’s an encouraging sign, the function had been significantly under-resourced in recent times; but one wonders whether there needs to be more done.  The DPC is responsible for three areas right now – privacy in relation to Internet Services companies like Facebook and Google; privacy in relation to state organisations like the Gardaí; and privacy in relation to private national companies who possess data.  That all three domains are vested in this single organisation says something for the breadth of work that these guys have to take on. But nowhere in their mandate does it suggest that they may have a role in commercial or security issues, for which there is no competent authority in the state, and certainly no strategy to address them.

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