The public(s) on life: A call for legal protection by design

Abstract

This chapter describes the implications of the computational turn for the formation of publics in constitutional democracies and argues that legal protection by design should prevent the erosion of fundamental rights in the Onlife world. In the first part the notion of the computational turn is described in reference to the increasing usage of artificial intelligence in a variety of contexts, highlighting a pervasive employment of predictive analytics to pre-empt human intention. Once such ubiquitous proactive computing becomes a defining characteristic of our environment we begin to live Onlife—assembling the online world into our lifeworld. In the second part the consequences of all this are investigated with regard to the public and the private sphere, concluding that we need space and time for public performance, private exposure and opacity of the self to sustain the preconditions of constitutional democracy. Part three explains how legal protection by design, as proposed in the current version of the General Data Protection Regulation, should protect and enable a plurality of publics, a choice of exposure and places to hide from the unwarranted gaze of the other(s). This should help to articulate a new hybrid social contract in the Onlife era.