Mireille Hildebrandt is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the Erasmus School of Law and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Law Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her PhD was in the legal philosophy of criminal procedure, with special focus on the role of punishment in the establishment and confirmation of legal norms. Since her move to Brussels she has studied the implications of smart technological infrastructures for the legal framework of constitutional democracy, for instance with regard to causality, liability, legal personhood, privacy and identity, citizenship, non-discrimination and data protection. She has been coordinator of profiling technologies in the research consortium on the Future of Identity in Information Society (funded by the European Commission), is a member of the stakeholder forum of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) and partakes in numerous fora on the issue of profiling, rule of law and democracy. She publishes in the field of criminal law and philosophy as well as the nexus of philosophy of technology and philosophy of law. She is Associate Editor of Criminal Law and Philosophy and of Identity in Information Society.
Ambient Intelligence, proactive computing, behavioural advertizing, smart monitoring and surveillance thrive on sophisticated profiling technologies. Profiling involves knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), allowing for a type of pattern recognition that is not possible by means of 'ordinary' human cognition. The profiles that result from the process of KDD are applied to individual persons or groups to anticipate their probable future behaviour. In the vision of Ambient Intelligence this should allow service providers to cater to consumers' inferred preferences even before they become aware of them. In the sphere of security it allows security agencies, police and intelligence agencies to engage in proactive policing or sentencing. These smart technologies raise a number of questions, of which those relating to privacy and security are only the more obvious ones. Social sorting, subliminal influencing and complications in the attribution of liability for harm caused challenge some of the foundations of the legal framework, requiring novel ways to think about the technological embodiment of legal instruments. I will argue that to sustain the system of checks and balances that stands for constitutional democracy, lawyers will have to re-articulate some the relevant legal protections into the socio-technical infrastructure they aim to protect against. Ambient Intelligence will require a vision of an Ambient Law.
New York City, NY; NYC