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Property, privacy and personhood in a world of ambient intelligence

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mireille Hildebrandt, Serge Gutwirth, Katja de Vries and Sari Depreeuw for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like the anonymous reviewers whose comments have proved to be very instructive and inspiring.

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  1. Center for Law, Science, Technology & Society Studies (LSTS), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Building B, 4th floor, room C339, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Niels van Dijk

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van Dijk, N. Property, privacy and personhood in a world of ambient intelligence. Ethics Inf Technol 12, 57–69 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-009-9211-0

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