Esclavos de los macrodatos. ¿O no?

En aquest treball es debat la noció de macrodades en relació amb la monetització de les dades personals. Es revisa el que afirmen alguns dels seus defensors i adversaris, segons els quals les macrodades impliquen que «n = totes», en el sentit que ja no és necessari utilitzar mostres atès que disposem de totes les dades, i s'arriba a la conclusió que aquest argument és al mateix temps massa optimista i innecessàriament pessimista. Es presenten una sèrie d'aspectes epistemològics i ètics relacionats amb les repercussions de les macrodades en la nostra percepció, cognició, imparcialitat i privadesa, i també en els deguts processos legals. A continuació l'article examina la idea de la gestió de dades personals centrada en l'usuari, per a esbrinar fins a quin punt aquest tipus de gestió aporta solucions d'alguns dels problemes plantejats per l'enigma de les macrodades. Es presta una atenció especial al principi bàsic de la legislació sobre protecció de dades, concretament el principi de finalitat vinculant. Per acabar, aquest treball vol indagar en la influència que té la política de les macrodades en la persona, la ment i la societat, i preguntar-nos com podem evitar de convertir-nos en esclaus de les macrodades.In this contribution, the notion of Big Data is discussed in relation to the monetisation of personal data. The claim of some proponents, as well as adversaries, that Big Data implies that ‘n = all’, meaning that we no longer need to rely on samples because we have all the data, is scrutinised and found to be both overly optimistic and unnecessarily pessimistic. A set of epistemological and ethical issues is presented, focusing on the implications of Big Data for our perception, cognition, fairness, privacy and due process. The article then looks into the idea of user-centric personal data management to investigate to what extent it provides solutions for some of the problems triggered by the Big Data conundrum. Special attention is paid to the core principle of data protection legislation, namely purpose binding. Finally, this contribution seeks to inquire into the influence of Big Data politics on self, mind and society, and asks how we can prevent ourselves from becoming slaves to Big Data.En este trabajo se debate la noción de macrodatos con relación a la monetización de los datos personales. Se revisa lo que afirman algunos de sus defensores y adversarios, según los cuales los macrodatos implican que «n = todos», en el sentido de que ya no es necesario utilizar muestras, puesto que disponemos de todos los datos, y se llega a la conclusión de que tal argumento es al mismo tiempo demasiado optimista e innecesariamente pesimista. Se presenta una serie de aspectos epistemológicos y éticos relacionados con las repercusiones de los macrodatos en nuestra percepción, cognición, imparcialidad y privacidad así como en los debidos procesos legales. A continuación, el artículo examina la idea de la gestión de datos personales centrada en el usuario, para averiguar hasta qué punto este tipo de gestión aporta soluciones a algunos de los problemas planteados por el enigma de los macrodatos. Se presta una especial atención al principio básico de la legislación sobre protección de datos, concretamente el principio de finalidad vinculante. Para terminar, este trabajo pretende indagar en la influencia que tiene la política de los macrodatos en la persona, la mente y la sociedad, y preguntarnos cómo podemos evitar el convertirnos en esclavos de los macrodatos

Governance, Governmentality, Police, and Justice: A New Science of Police?

Review of The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, Markus D. Dubber & Mariana Valverde, eds

The Indeterminacy of an Emergency: Challenges to Criminal Jurisdiction in Constitutional Democracy

In this contribution I address the type of emergency that threatens a state's monopoly of violence, meaning that the state's competence to provide citizens with elementary security is challenged. The question is, whether actions taken by the state to ward off these threats (should) fall within the ambit of the criminal law. A central problem is the indeterminacy that is inherent in the state of emergency, implicating that adequate measures as well as constitutional constraints to be imposed on such measures cannot easily be determined in advance. This indeterminacy raises two interrelated issues. Firstly, the issue of whether it makes sense to speak of criminal jurisdiction when the existing jurisdiction is challenged as such. To what extent does the indeterminacy call for inherently unlimited powers of the state, implying there can be no such thing as criminal jurisdiction during a state of emergency? Second-if criminal jurisdiction is not in contradiction with the state of emergency-the issue of what criminal liability could mean in such a state needs to be confronted. To what extent does the indeterminacy inherent in the state of emergency jeopardise criminal liability because such indeterminacy engenders severe legal uncertainty regarding the standards against which the relevant actions are to be judged? Both issues will be discussed from the perspective of constitutional democracy, assuming that what is at stake in times of emergency is both the competence to sustain the monopoly of violence and the possibility to constrain the powers of the state. © 2010 The Author(s)

Crossroads in New media, Identity & Law

__Abstract__ This volume brings together a number of timely contributions at the nexus of new media, politics and law. The central intuition that ties these essays together is that information and communication technology, cultural identity, and legal and political institutions are spheres that co-evolve and interpenetrate in myriad ways. Discussing these shifting relationships, the contributions all probe the question of what shape diversity will take as a result of the changes in the way we communicate and spread information: that is, are we heading to the disintegration and fragmentation of national and cultural identity, or is society moving towards more consolidation, standardization and centralization at a transnational level? In an age of digitization and globalization, this book addresses the question of whether this calls for a new civility fit for the 21st century

Observations and reflexivity:responsibilising interdisciplinarity and integration

This policy report is based in Epinet WP2 and complements WP1 reporting on the EPINET Integrated Assessment Framework as a Tool for RRI . We present key findings from the empirical research we conducted and was designed to be an instrument of observation and reflexivity in reference to the interdisciplinary innovation assessment cases conducted as part of the Epinet project. In particular, we report on the procedural conditions in carrying out these cases as the basis on which our policy recommendations rest

Polymorphic Encryption and Pseudonymisation for Personalised Healthcare

Polymorphic encryption and Pseudonymisation, abbreviated as PEP, form a novel approach for the management of sensitive personal data, especially in health care. Traditional encryption is rather rigid: once encrypted, only one key can be used to decrypt the data. This rigidity is becoming an every greater problem in the context of big data analytics, where different parties who wish to investigate part of an encrypted data set all need the one key for decryption. Polymorphic encryption is a new cryptographic technique that solves these problems. Together with the associated technique of polymorphic pseudonymisation new security and privacy guarantees can be given which are essential in areas such as (personalised) healthcare, medical data collection via self-measurement apps, and more generally in privacy-friendly identity management and data analytics. The key ideas of polymorphic encryption are: 1. Directly after generation, data can be encrypted in a `polymorphic\u27 manner and stored at a (cloud) storage facility in such a way that the storage provider cannot get access. Crucially, there is no need to a priori fix who gets to see the data, so that the data can immediately be protected. For instance a PEP-enabled self-measurement device will store all its measurement data in polymorphically encrypted form in a back-end data base. 2. Later on it can be decided who can decrypt the data. This decision will be made on the basis of a policy, in which the data subject should play a key role. The user of the PEP-enabled device can, for instance, decide that doctors $X,Y,Z$ may at some stage decrypt to use the data in their diagnosis, or medical researcher groups $A, B, C$ may use it for their investigations, or third parties $U,V,W$ may use it for additional services, etc. 3. This `tweaking\u27 of the encrypted data to make it decryptable by a specific party can be done in a blind manner. It will have to be done by a trusted party who knows how to tweak the ciphertext for whom. This PEP technology can provide the necessary security and privacy infrastructure for big data analytics. People can entrust their data in polymorphically encrypted form, and each time decide later to make (parts of) it available (decryptable) for specific parties, for specific analysis purposes. In this way users remain in control, and can monitor which of their data is used where by whom for which purposes. The polymorphic encryption infrastructure can be supplemented with a pseudonymisation infrastructure which is also polymorphic, and guarantees that each individual will automatically have different pseudonyms at different parties and can only be de-pseudonymised by participants (like medical doctors) who know the original identity. This white paper provides an introduction to Polymorphic Encryption and Pseudonymisation (PEP), at different levels of abstraction, focusing on health care as application area. It contains a general description of PEP, explaining the basic functionality for laymen, supplemented by a clarification of the legal framework provided by the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. The paper also contains a more advanced, mathematically oriented description of PEP, including the underlying cryptographic primitives, key and pseudonym managment, interaction protocols, etc. This second part is aimed at readers with a background in computer security and cryptography. The cryptographic basis for PEP is ElGamal public key encryption, which is well-known since the mid 1980s. It is the way in which this encryption is used --- with re-randomisation, re-keying and re-shuffling --- that is new. The PEP framework is currently elaborated into an open design and open source (prototype) implementation at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The technology will be used and tested in a real-life medical research project at the Radboud University Medical Center

Correlates of absolute and excessive weight gain during pregnancy

OBJECTIVE: Factors associated with weight gain during pregnancy that may be linked to maternal overweight and obesity were examined. METHODS: In this observational study, 144 women reported on demographics, (prepregnancy) body weight, and lifestyles in self-reported questionnaires at 30 weeks gestation. Body weight at the end of pregnancy (self-reported at 6 weeks postpartum) was used to determine total gestational weight gain. Multivariate prediction models were developed to identify factors associated with total gestational weight gain and excessive gestational weight gain (i.e., higher weight gain than recommended by the Institute of Medicine). RESULTS: Women gained 14.4 (+/-5.0) kg during pregnancy. Obese women gained almost 4 kg less than normal weight women. Pregnant women judging themselves to be less physically active or women who reported increased food intakes during pregnancy gained significantly more weight. Over one third of women (38%) gained more weight than recommended. Being overweight, judging yourself to be less physically active than others, and a perceived elevated food intake during pregnancy were significantly associated with excessive weight gain (odds ratio [OR] = 6.33, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.01-19.32; OR = 3.96, 95% CI: 1.55l, 10.15; and OR = 3.14, 95% CI: 1.18, 8.36, respectively). A higher age at menarche and hours of sleep reduced the odds for excessive weight gain (OR = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.57, 0.99; and OR = 0.35, 95% CI: 0.57, 0.93, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Mean hours of sleep, perceived physical activity, and measures of food intake at 30 weeks gestation were identified as modifiable behavioral correlates for excessive gestational weight gain. Strategies to optimize gestational weight gain need to be explored, with a focus on the identified factors

Gadgets on the move and in stasis Consumer and medical electronics, what's the difference? Summary of findings and policy recommendations

This document provides a set of policy recommendations, based on the findings of a three-year long case study on wearable sensors. The key objective was to assess state-of-the-art developments in this domain of innovation, using evaluation and analytic methods that correspond with the expertise and experience available on our study team and among our associates in industry and innovation, medicine, policy, grass roots activism, STS and ELS study traditions. Our aim is to provide guidelines for good governance of wearable sensors, in light of their potential roles in medical settings as well as their currency as consumer electronics for quasi-medical purposes. We provide recommendations for ongoing innovation in this field, considering the necessity of mutual recognition and reflexive knowledge exchange among innovators and industrial actors, medical expertise, scholarly and technical assessments, patient organisations and grass roots activism, policy developers and regulators

Gadgets on the move and in stasis: consumer and medical electronics, what's the difference?

This document provides a set of policy recommendations, based on the findings of a three-year long case study on wearable sensors. The key objective was to assess state-of-the-art developments in this domain of innovation, using evaluation and analytic methods that correspond with the expertise and experience available on our study team and among our associates in industry and innovation, medicine, policy, grass roots activism, STS and ELS study traditions. Our aim is to provide guidelines for good governance of wearable sensors, in light of their potential roles in medical settings as well as their currency as consumer electronics for quasi-medical purposes. We provide recommendations for ongoing innovation in this field, considering the necessity of mutual recognition and reflexive knowledge exchange among innovators and industrial actors, medical expertise, scholarly and technical assessments, patient organisations and grass roots activism, policy developers and regulators