Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

individual may have multiple profiles. Just as a marketer will aim to profile groups (based
on, e.g., a correlation between postcodes and incomes), 183 so advertisers may strive to
isolate individual profiles (Google ads based on browsing histories). Indeed individual
and group profiles crosscut and support one another. In order to successfully target my
browser, the marketer must have a functional group profile for its target market and a
means of profiling me to assess my congruence.
Isabelle Stengers provides a striking image of the accumulation of the personal profile:
[A] bubble chamber is a container full of saturated vapour such that if
you have an energetic particle travelling through it, its many successive
encounters with a gas molecule will produce a small local liquefaction:
quantum mechanics tell us that we cannot define the path of a particle but,
because of the bubble chamber, we can “see” its “profile”. 184
One might imagine scuffs of dust arising wherever the subject’s data footprint touches
the informational ground, so to speak – and this trail of dust clouds suspended, linked,
and analysed for patterns. Data are generated locally and randomly in the course
of everyday activities, but instead of disappearing into the ether, they are preserved
somewhere, in specimens or samples, but already part of a wider pattern that discloses
a path or a habitat or a set of attitudes, and these in turn ultimately identify the person
who originated them.
Data are generated locally and randomly in the course of everyday activities,
but instead of disappearing into the ether, they are preserved somewhere, in
specimens or samples, but already part of a wider pattern that discloses a path
or a habitat or a set of attitudes, and these in turn ultimately identify the person
who originated them.
These metaphors remind us that the problem presented by profiles is not solely that
of “sensitive” or “private” information going public. What is problematic is the fact that
hundreds of fragments of randomly generated trivial information may come to constitute
the person as a data subject, who is acted upon and must act. As Mireille Hildebrandt
puts it, “the proliferation of automatically generated profiles could have a profound
impact on a variety of decisions that influence the life of European citizens. At the same
time it seems unclear whether and how a person could trace if and when decisions
concerning her life are taken on the basis of such profiles”. 185
From a human rights perspective, much is made of the “special categories” of “sensitive”
data prohibited from processing in Article 8 of the EU Directive: “racial or ethnic origin,
political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, and...
health or sex life”. The special treatment of these categories appears intended to
safeguard against discrimination on those grounds, the phenomenon of “racial profiling”
and so on. But it is clear that the Directive itself does not provide a robust source of
non-discrimination. On one hand, extensive exceptions on grounds of national security,
criminal proceedings, and health appear to undermine even the application of standard
183 See David Phillips and Michael Curry, “Privacy and the phenetic urge: geodemographics and the
changing spatiality of local practice” in David Lyon (ed.), Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk
and Digital Discrimination, Routledge (2003), 137.
184 Cited in Gutwirth and De Hert (2005), 27.
185 Hildebrandt (2005), 29.
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