News and Research articles on Profiling

Over the past fifty years, surveillance practices once considered untenable due to their incompatibility with democratic rights and values have been rebranded as tolerable, neutral, or even desirable.

There is an increase in the Orwellian nature of schemes and programmes being launched in India, in spite of the absence of concrete privacy and data protection laws. While a major step towards mass surveillance was taken a few years ago in the form of “Aadhaar”, the central and state governments have subsequently adopted schemes which involve collection and processing of voluminous amounts of data.

Cloud computing: analysing the trade-off between user comfort and autonomy

Primavera De Filippi, Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science (CERSA/CNRS), Université Paris II (Panthéon-Assas)
PUBLISHED ON: 13 Jun 2013 DOI: 10.14763/2013.2.135

This article presents a general analysis of how user autonomy in the internet cloud is increasingly put into jeopardy by the growing comfort and efficiency of the user-interface. Although this issue has not been, thus far, explicitly addressed by the law, it is a fundamental ethical question that should be carefully assessed to guide the future deployment of cloud computing.