Data-Driven Personalisation in Markets, Politics and Law

Description

The most fascinating and profitable subject of predictive algorithms is the human actor. Analysing big data through learning algorithms to predict and pre-empt individual decisions gives a powerful tool to corporations, political parties and the state. Algorithmic analysis of digital footprints, as an omnipresent form of surveillance, has already been used in diverse contexts: behavioural advertising, personalised pricing, political micro-targeting, precision medicine, and predictive policing and prison sentencing. This volume brings together experts to offer philosophical, sociological, and legal perspectives on these personalised data practices. It explores common themes such as choice, personal autonomy, equality, privacy, and corporate and governmental efficiency against the normative frameworks of the market, democracy and the rule of law. By offering these insights, this collection on data-driven personalisation seeks to stimulate an interdisciplinary debate on one of the most pervasive, transformative, and insidious socio-technical developments of our time.

Uta Kohl is Professor of Commercial Law at Southampton Law School. Her previous work on IT law issues includes Jurisdiction and the Internet (Cambridge, 2007) and The Net and the Nation State (Cambridge, 2016). She acted as the Human Rights Trustee on the board of the Internet Watch Foundation (2014-2020) and is currently exploring the legal treatment of memories, funded by a Leverhulme grant on the Privacy of the Dead. Jacob Eisler is Associate Professor at Southampton Law School where he focuses on democratic theory, election law, and corruption. Prior to joining Southampton Law School, he was the Yates-Glazebrook Fellow in Law at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. and clerked for the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch, Federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

'Exploring the societal sea changes that emerge from the unleashed power of data-driven personalization, Uta Kohl and Jacob Eisler are gifting us a book that is the intellectual equivalent of a beautiful flower bouquet: a diverse and colorful, yet carefully chosen and elegantly arranged set of contributions from scholars representing different disciplines, perspectives, and temperaments, making it an insightful collection that is more than the sum of its individual parts.' Urs Gasser, Executive Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School 'With vision and panache, Kohl and Eisler, and their contributing authors, identify the hidden perils of the 'personalisation' phenomenon and boldly ask whether its apparent benefits of a 'close personal fit' and efficiency can ever outweigh the damage done to individual agency and communal solidarity, or to our aspirations of equality. Invaluable insights for the policy and legal debates on the use of predictive algorithms in politics, markets and law, which are upon us.' Paul De Hert, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Tilburg University