In his new book, Data Protection Law and Emotion, Damian Clifford (Australian National University) brings the literatures on law and emotion, and data protection law together. By defending the role of individuals, the book explores the critiques of control found in the scholarly literature.
During this book talk, Clifford will discuss his book with Silvia de Conca (VU) and Marijn Sax (UvA), and together they will reflect on the role of individual choice in a digital world characterised by asymmetries of power and information.
Book summary
Data protection law is often positioned as a regulatory solution to the risks posed by computational systems. Despite the widespread adoption of data protection laws, however, there are those who remain sceptical as to their capacity to engender change. Much of this criticism focuses on our role as ‘data subjects’. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that we lack the capacity to act in our own best interests and, what is more, that our decisions have negative impacts on others. Our decision-making limitations seem to be the inevitable by-product of the technological, social, and economic reality. Data protection law bakes in these limitations by providing frameworks for notions such as consent and subjective control rights and by relying on those who process our data to do so fairly.
Despite these valid concerns, Data Protection Law and Emotion argues that the (in)effectiveness of these laws are often more difficult to discern than the critical literature would suggest, while also emphasizing the importance of the conceptual value of subjective control. These points are explored (and indeed, exposed) by investigating data protection law through the lens of the insights provided by law and emotion scholarship which allows for a clearer articulation of the instrumental challenges of implementing control and also a clearer expression of its potential conceptual value. The book uses the development of Emotional Artificial Intelligence, a particularly controversial technology, as a case study to analyse these issues.
About the author
Damian Clifford is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the Australian National University. Previously a FWO Aspirant Fellow at KU Leuven’s Centre for IT and IP Law (CiTiP), his research focuses on privacy, data protection and technology regulation, and he has published across these fields. Damian is one of the core editors of the Cambridge Elements series, Data Rights and Wrongs (Cambridge University Press). His books Data and Private Law (Hart Publishing, edited with Jeannie Marie Paterson and Kwan Ho Lau) and Data Protection Law and Emotion (Oxford University Press) were published in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
Practical details:
Date: 22 October 2024
Time: 16.30 – 18.00
Place: IViR Room, REC A5.24