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Mass Data Surveillance and Predictive Policing

25 March 2025, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

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Join UCL IIPP in conversation with Plixavra Vogiatzoglou, Matthew Cole and Cecilia Rikap

This event is free.

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All

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Free

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IIPP Comms

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Join this fascinating discussion on Tuesday 25th March 2024 at 17:30-19:00 (BST) at University College London (UCL) and online on zoom.

About this talk:

Mass Data Surveillance and Predictive Policing critically assesses legal frameworks involving the bulk processing of personal data, initially collected by the private sector, to predict and prevent crime through advanced profiling technologies. In the EU, mass data surveillance currently engages three sectors: electronic communications (under the e-Privacy Directive), air travelling (under the Passenger Name Records Directive) and finance (under the Anti-Money Laundering Directive), and increasingly intersects with the deployment of predictive policing techniques. The book questions the legitimacy and impact of these frameworks in light of the EU’s powers to provide security while safeguarding fundamental rights, particularly privacy, data protection, effective remedy, fair trial and presumption of innocence.

Focusing on the security shift towards forestalling crime before it occurs, the book identifies its distinct characteristics, such as the blurred lines between the public and private sector actors, and interrogates whether the legal bases and traditional theories on security can account for it. The book further explores the challenges these pre-crime practices pose, including their questionable effectiveness and the ambiguous application of human rights safeguards in situations where no crime has been committed, yet individuals face consequences as the result of deploying predictive analytics on mass amounts of commercially collected personal data. In examining the interference with several fundamental rights, the book also highlights aspects neglected by the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, such as the expansive nature and the collective and cumulative effects of these frameworks.

This book should appeal to students, scholars, legal practitioners, policymakers, and data scientists working in the fields of information law, human rights, public policy, security, surveillance, and crime prevention. 

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Meet the panel:

  • Speaker: Dr. Plixavra Vogiatzoglou | Postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and the Institute for Information Law (IViR) | University of Amsterdam.
  • Discussant: Dr. Matthew Cole | Assistant Professor of Technology, Work and Employment | University of Sussex.
  • Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap | Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

Read more about IIPP Conversations 2024-25

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About the Speakers

Plixavra Vogiatzoglou

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Dr. Plixavra Vogiatzoglou (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the concept of digital sovereignty and how the promotion and promise of emerging and future technologies, such as quantum technologies, shape it. She holds a PhD from the KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law, where she remains an affiliated senior researcher, and is a qualified lawyer in Greece.  More about Plixavra Vogiatzoglou

Cecilia Rikap

Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Cecilia
Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- UCL. Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) “Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism uncovered” (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) “The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order” (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states. More about Cecilia Rikap

Matthew Cole

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Matthew Cole is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Work and Employment at the University of Sussex. His research revolves around the political economy of work and technology, with a particular focus on wage theft, artificial intelligence, and labour market policy. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit).  More about Matthew Cole