While the GDPR and other EU laws seek to mitigate a range of potential harms associated with smart cities, the compliance with and enforceability of these regulations remain an issue. In addition, these proposed regulations do not sufficiently address the collective harms associated with the...

Smart city technologies can have detrimental effects on human rights, making it crucial to mitigate them in the R&D phase. This qualitative socio-legal study of the Helsinki metropolitan area (HMA) explores how public funding for smart city research and development (R&D), and the data protection...

Smart cities are rarely built smart from scratch. For most cities, 'smart city' signifies the presence of several smart city projects that emerge over time from various actors. These projects rely on extensive data and algorithms whose use in urban spaces and/or decision-making processes can...

Privately developed artificial intelligence (AI) systems are frequently used in smart city technologies. The negative effects of such systems on individuals' human rights are increasingly clear, but we still only have a snapshot of their long-term risks to human rights. The central role of AI...

There is an increasing gap between the right to privacy and contemporary surveillance schemes. As a concrete example, the US surveillance operation PRISM and its impact on European citizens' right to privacy is discussed. This paper provides a brief introduction to PRISM, continues with an...

Online communications and activities require the intermediation of numerous private entities that unilaterally define and implement their terms of service (ToS). The substantive provisions set in the ToS regulate the relationships between intermediaries and users with a binding force that may be...

This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Adopting a Science and Technology...

In 2015, the Australian government passed the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act, which requires ISPs to collect metadata about their users and store this metadata for two years. From its conception, Australia's data retention scheme has been...

In the past years, there has been a growing scholarly attention given to "digital rights contention", that is political conflicts related to the expansion or restriction of civil and political rights exerted through, or affected by, digital communications technologies. Yet, when we turn to...

This article argues that political micro-targeting impacts the fundamental right of thenon-targeted citizens to receive information, and consequently, the democratic public discourse. The right to information is the passive side of freedom of expression, among other protected by Article 10 of...