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Who knows what about me in Big Data Space?

Mireille Hildebrandt

Companies and governments store huge amounts of data about citizens. With the help of artificial intelligence, your behaviour and preferences are predicted. What is the added value and what are the dangers of these predictions?

What if the NSA knows who you called when and for how long? Who cares about behavioral advertising if it gets you free service? What decisions are taken by environments that foresee your preferences?
Companies and governments store huge amounts of data about consumers and citizens. With the help of artificial intelligence, patterns are revealed in this Big Data Space that cannot be detected with old fashioned statistics or the naked human eye. In this way, consumer preferences and citizens' criminal behaviors are predicted. Professor Mireille Hildebrandt will discuss the added value as well as the many risks of these predictions. Will the knowledge inferred from Big Data Space help us fight crime? Will criminal profiling on the basis of smart statistics turn the presumption of innocence inside out? Will the time come that if you match the pattern, it is up to you to prove your innocence?

Mireille Hildebrandt holds the Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the institute of Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is a legal philosopher and a lawyer who also works at the Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam and the research group on Law, Science, Technology & Society studies (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She is one of the founding members of the Digital Enlightenment Forum and the ONLIFE initiative, and publishes widely on the nexus of philosophy of law and technology, notably on the impact of smart technologies on democracy and the Rule of Law.

Interesting links:
NewYorkTimes.com: How companies learn your secrets
Binnenlandsbestuur.nl: Mireille Hildebrandt - Niet Big Brother maar Kafka dreigt
YouTube.com: Mireille Hildebrandt - Privacy in Cyberspace

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Introduction/discussion: Kai Epstude, Assistant Professor of Psychology
English

(USA, 1993, 120 min, directed by Frank Marshall)