Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.
Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data, Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.
Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.
At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.
Author(s): Elizabeth M. Renieris
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 235
City: Cambridge
Contents
Author’s Note
Preface
Prologue
Introduction
What Is Data?
Historical Origins of Data
Data and the Law
Why We Must Go beyond Data
I Before Data
1 The Main Frame
The Philosophical and Legal Origins of Privacy
International Human Rights Law and Privacy as Protection from Interference by the State
Advances in Computing Challenge Traditional Notions of Privacy
Early Data Protection Laws Emerge in Response to Government Databases
An International Consensus Emerges around Fair Information Practice Principles
2 Update Failed
As International Consensus around Data Protection Emerges, so Does a New Digital Economy
Motivated by Economics, Europe Attempts to Upgrade Its Data Protection Laws
US Law and Policymakers Reinterpret the FIPPs to Favor Commerce
Europe Endeavors to Modernize Its Data Protection Laws
Dominant Commercial Interests Undermine Efforts to Update the Law
These Distortions Are Replicated the World Over
II Data, Data Everywhere
3 The Singular-ity
US Lawmakers Aim to Let People Control Their Data
The Market Seeks to Let People Own, Control, and Even Sell Personal Data
The Poverty of an Overly Individualistic Approach Focused on Data
More Collective Approaches Emerge but Still Suffer from an Obsession with Data
4 (Data) Privacy, the Handmaiden
Big Tech Goes on a Privacy PR Offensive
Big Tech Adopts PETs
The Problem with PETs
Distorting Privacy Helps Tech Consolidate Power
Distorting Privacy Also Threatens the Public Sphere
Privacy Risks Becoming a Handmaiden of Surveillance and Control
III Beyond Data
5 A Brave New World
Emotion Detection and Affect Recognition Technologies
Neurotechnologies and Neuromarketing
The Internet of Things and Bodies
“Metaversal” Technologies
“Phygital” Identity and Machine-Readable Humans
“Smart” Cities versus “Public” Spaces
Data and the Cyberphysical World
The Limits of Existing Legal Frameworks in the Cyberphysical World
6 Against the Datafication of Life
The Exceptional Treatment of “Tech Companies”
Datafication and Its Enablers
The Inadequacies of Data Protection
Natural Limits on Datafication
Normative Limits on Datafication
Limits on Private Power
Defining the Limits of Permissible Datafication
7 Back to the Future: A Return to Human Rights
Human Rights and Technology Governance
Human Rights and the Metaverse
Emotion Recognition, Neurotechnologies, and Human Rights
Digital Identity and Human Rights
Recalibrating Human Rights for a Postdigital World
Human Rights as a Backstop against Commodification
Human Rights and Consensus
Acknowledgments
Notes
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Index
