Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-19T18:02:43.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Personalisation, Markets, and Contract: The Limits of Legal Incrementalism

from Part II - Themes: Personal Autonomy, Market Choices and the Presumption of Innocence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2021

Uta Kohl
Affiliation:
Southampton Law School
Jacob Eisler
Affiliation:
Southampton Law School
Get access

Summary

The legal approach to regulating data-driven personalisation has relied heavily on extending and reusing legal categories and concepts – in particular, the idea of privacy of personal information and the legitimating role of consent in permitting the use of personal information – that were originally devised to deal with a very different problem. This chapter argues that this approach is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. Firstly, data-driven personalisation – unlike the traditional core of privacy – is deeply enmeshed in contractual relationships, and both the gathering and the use of data are mediated by contractual terms. As this chapter shows, the result is that ‘privacy’ and ‘consent’ do not provide an adequate evaluative framework to model or mitigate the deleterious impact of data-driven personalisation on individuals. Secondly, consent derives its normative force from the presumption that it is necessarily autonomy-enhancing. As this chapter shows, however, data-driven personalisation has a strong derelationalising effect which erodes rather than enhances the data subject’s autonomy, calling into question the assumptions underpinning privacy-based approaches. The chapter concludes by arguing that dealing with these problems requires adopting a new, more substantive approach, which works to explicitly restrict the processes, structures, and purposes through which and for which personalisation is used.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×