4.1 Introduction
Is a future in which our emotions are being detected in real time and tracked, both in private and public spaces, dawning? Looking at recent technological developments, studies, patents, and ongoing experimentations, this may well be the case.Footnote 1 In its Declaration on the manipulative capabilities of algorithmic processes of February 2019, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers alerts us for the growing capacity of contemporary machine learning tools not only to predict choices but also to influence emotions, thoughts, and even actions, sometimes subliminally.Footnote 2 This certainly adds a new dimension to existing computational means, which increasingly make it possible to infer intimate and detailed information about individuals from readily available data, facilitating the micro-targeting of individuals based on profiles in a way that may profoundly affect their lives.Footnote 3 Emotional artificial intelligence (further ‘emotional AI’) and empathic media are new buzzwords used to refer to the affective computing sub-discipline and, specifically, to the technologies that are claimed to be capable of detecting, classifying, and responding appropriately to users’ emotional lives, thereby appearing to understand their audience.Footnote 4 These technologies rely on a variety of methods, including the analysis of facial expressions, physiological measuring, analyzing voice, monitoring body movements, and eye tracking.Footnote 5
Although there have been important debates as to their accuracy, the adoption of emotional AI technologies is increasingly widespread, in many areas and for various purposes, both in the public and private sectors.Footnote 6 It is well-known that advertising and marketing go hand in hand with an attempt to exploit emotions for commercial gain.Footnote 7 Emotional AI facilitates the systematic gathering of insightsFootnote 8 and allows for the further personalization of commercial communications and the optimization of marketing campaigns in real time.Footnote 9 Quantifying, tracking, and manipulating emotions is a growing part of the social media business model.Footnote 10 For example, Facebook is now infamous in this regard due to its emotional contagionFootnote 11 experiment where users’ newsfeeds were manipulated to assess changes in emotion (to assess whether Facebook posts with emotional content were more engaging).Footnote 12 A similar trend has been witnessed in the political sphere – think of the Cambridge Analytica scandalFootnote 13 (where data analytics was used to gauge the personalities of potential Trump voters).Footnote 14 The aforementioned Declaration of the Council of Europe, among others, points to the dangers for democratic societies that emanate from the possibility to employ algorithmic tools capable of manipulating and controlling not only economic choices but also social and political behaviours.Footnote 15
Do we need new (constitutional) rights, as suggested by some, in light of growing practices of manipulation by algorithms, in general, and the emergence of emotional AI, in particular? Or, is the current law capable of accommodating such developments adequately? This is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating debates for legal scholars in the coming years. It is also on the radar of CAHAI, the Council of Europe’s Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence, set up on 11 September 2019, with the mission to examine the feasibility and potential elements of a legal framework for the development, design, and application of AI, based on the Council of Europe’s standards on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.Footnote 16
In the light of these ongoing policy discussions, the ambition of this chapter is twofold. First, it will discuss certain legal-ethical challenges posed by the emergence of emotional AI and its manipulative capabilities. Second, it will present a number of responses, specifically those suggesting the introduction of new (constitutional) rights to mitigate the potential negative effects of such developments. Given the limited scope of the chapter, it does not seek to evaluate the appropriateness of the identified suggestions, but rather to provide the foundation for a future research agenda in that direction. The focus of the chapter lies on the European legal framework and on the use of emotions for commercial business-to-consumer purposes, although some observations are also valid in the context of other highly relevant uses of emotional AI,Footnote 17 such as implementations by the public sector, or for the purpose of political micro-targeting, or fake news. The chapter is based on a literature review, including recent academic scholarship and grey literature. Its methodology relies on a legal analysis of how the emergence of emotional AI raises concerns and challenges for ‘constitutional’ rights and values through the lens of its use in the business to consumer context. With constitutional rights, we do not refer to national constitutions, but given the chapter’s focus on the European level, to the fundamental rights and values as enshrined in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (‘ECHR’), on the one hand, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (‘CFREU’) and Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (‘TEU’), on the other.
4.2 Challenges to Constitutional Rights and Underlying Values
Protecting the Citizen-Consumer
Emotion has always been at the core of advertising and marketing, and emotion detection has been used in market research for several decades.Footnote 18 Consequently, in various areas of EU and national law, rules have been adopted to protect consumers and constrain forms of manipulative practices in business-to-consumer relations. Media and advertising laws have introduced prohibitions on false, misleading, deceptive, and surreptitious advertising, including an explicit ban on subliminal advertising.Footnote 19 Consumer protection law instruments shield consumers from aggressive, unfair, and deceptive trade practices.Footnote 20 Competition law prohibits exploitative abuses of market power.Footnote 21 Data protection law has set strict conditions under which consumers’ personal data can be collected and processed.Footnote 22 Under contract law, typical grounds for a contract being voidable include coercion, undue influence, misrepresentation, or fraud. The latter, fraud (i.e., the intentional deception to secure an unfair or unlawful gain, or deprive a victim of her legal right) is considered a criminal offence. In the remainder of the text, these rules are referred to as ‘consumer protection law in the broad sense’, as they protect citizens as economic actors.
Nevertheless, the employment of emotional AI may justify additional layers of protection. The growing effectiveness of the technology drew public attention following Facebook’s aforementioned emotional contagionFootnote 23 experiment, where users’ newsfeeds were manipulated to assess changes in emotion (to assess whether Facebook posts with emotional content were more engaging),Footnote 24 as well as the Cambridge Analytica scandalFootnote 25 (where it was used to gauge the personalities of potential Trump voters).Footnote 26 There are also data to suggest that Facebook had offered advertisers the ability to target advertisements to teenagers based on real-time extrapolation of their mood.Footnote 27 Yet Facebook is obviously not alone in exploiting emotional AI (and emotions) in similar ways.Footnote 28 As noted by Stark and Crawford, commenting on the fallout from the emotional contagion experiment, it is clear that quantifying, tracking, and ‘manipulating emotions’ is a growing part of the social media business model.Footnote 29 Researchers are documenting the emergence of what Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’Footnote 30 and, in particular, its reliance on behavioural tracking and manipulation.Footnote 31 Forms of ‘dark patterns’ are increasingly detected, exposed, and – to some extent – legally constrained. Dark patterns can be described as exploitative design choices, ‘features of interface design crafted to trick users into doing things that they might not want to do, but which benefit the business in question’.Footnote 32 In its report from 2018, the Norwegian Consumer Authority called the use by large digital service providers (in particular Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) of such dark patterns an ‘unethical’ attempt to push consumers towards the least privacy friendly options of their services.Footnote 33 Moreover, it questioned whether such practices are in accordance with the principles of data protection by default and data protection by design, and whether consent given under these circumstances can be said to be explicit, informed, and freely given. It stated that ‘[w]hen digital services employ dark patterns to nudge users towards sharing more personal data, the financial incentive has taken precedence over respecting users’ right to choose. The practice of misleading consumers into making certain choices, which may put their privacy at risk, is unethical and exploitative.’ In 2019, the French data protection authority, CNIL, effectively fined Google for the violation of transparency and information obligations and lack of (valid) consent for advertisements personalization. In essence, the users were not aware of the extent of personalization.Footnote 34 Notably, the Deceptive Experiences to Online Users Reduction Act, as introduced by senators Deb Fischer and Mark Warner in the United States (the so-called DETOUR Act), explicitly provided protection against ‘manipulation of user interfaces’ and offered prohibiting dark patterns when seeking consent to use personal information.Footnote 35
It is unlikely, though, that existing consumer protection law (in the broad sense) will be capable of providing a conclusive and exhaustive answer to the question of where to draw the line between forms of permissible persuasion and unacceptable manipulation in the case of emotional AI. On the one hand, there may be situations in which dubious practices escape the scope of application of existing laws. Think of the cameras installed at Piccadilly Lights in London which are able to detect faces in the crowd around the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, and ‘when they identify a face the technology works out an approximate age, sex, mood (based on whether think you are frowning or laughing) and notes some characteristics such as whether you wear glasses or whether you have a beard’.Footnote 36 The cameras have been used during a certain period with the purpose of optimizing the advertising displayed on Piccadilly Lights.Footnote 37 Even if such practices of emotional AI in public spaces are not considered in violation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (given the claimed immediate anonymization of the faces detected), they raise serious question marks from an ethical perspective.Footnote 38 On the other hand, the massive scale with which certain practices are deployed may surpass the enforcement of individual rights. The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly expressed concerns that persuasive technologies enable ‘massive psychological experimentation and persuasion on the internet’.Footnote 39 Such practices seem to require a collective answer (e.g., by including them in the blacklist of commercial practices),Footnote 40 since enforcement in individual cases risks being ineffective in remedying harmful effects on society as a whole.
Moreover, emotional AI is arguably challenging the very underlying rationality-based paradigm imbued in (especially, but not limited to) consumer protection law. Modern legality is characterized by a separation of rational thinking (or reason) from emotion and consumer protection essentially rely on rationality.Footnote 41 As noted by Maloney, the law works from the perspective that rational thinking and emotion ‘belong to separate spheres of human existence; the sphere of law admits only of reason; and vigilant policing is required to keep emotion from creeping in where it does not belong’.Footnote 42 The law is traditionally weighted towards the protection of the verifiable propositional content of commercial communications; however, interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognizing the persuasive effect of the unverifiable content (i.e., images, music)Footnote 43 and has long recognized that people interact with computers as social agents and not just tools.Footnote 44 It may be reasonably argued that the separation of rationality from affect in the law fails to take interdisciplinary insights into account.Footnote 45 In relation to this, the capacity of the current legal framework to cope with the advancements is in doubt. In particular, since the development of emotion detection technology facilitates the creation of emotion-evolved consumer-facing interactions, it poses challenges to the framework which relies on rationality.Footnote 46 The developments arguably raise concerns regarding the continuing reliance on the rationality paradigm within consumer protections, and hence consumer self-determination and individual autonomy, as core underlying principles of the legal protections.
Motivating a Constitutional Debate
The need for guidance about how to apply and, where relevant, complement existing consumer protection laws (in the broad sense) in light of the rise of emotional AI motivates the need for a debate at a more fundamental level, looking at constitutional and ethical frameworks. The following paragraphs – revolving around three main observations – focus on the former of these frameworks, and will highlight how emotion detection and manipulation may pose threats to the effective enjoyment of constitutional rights and freedoms.
What’s in a Name?
By way of preliminary observation, it should be stressed that, as noted by Sunstein, manipulation has ‘many shades’ and is extremely difficult to define.Footnote 47 Is an advertising campaign by an automobile company showing a sleek, attractive couple exiting from a fancy car before going to a glamorous party ‘manipulation’? Do governments – in an effort to discourage smoking – engage in ‘manipulation’ when they require cigarette packages to contain graphic, frightening health warnings, depicting people with life-threatening illnesses? Is showing unflattering photographs of your opponent during a political campaign ‘manipulation’? Is setting an opt-out consent system for deceased organ donation as the legislative default ‘manipulation’? Ever since Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published their influential book Nudge, a rich debate has ensued on the permissibility of deploying choice architectures for behavioural change.Footnote 48 The debate, albeit extremely relevant in the emotional AI context, exceeds the scope of this chapter, and is inherently linked to political-philosophical discussions. A key takeaway from Sunstein’s writing is that, in a social order that values free markets and is committed to freedom of expression, it is ‘exceptionally difficult to regulate manipulation as such’.Footnote 49 He suggests to consider a statement or action as manipulative to the extent that it does not sufficiently engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. This reminds us of the notions of consumer self-determination and individual autonomy, which we mentioned previously and which will also be discussed further in this section.
From Manipulation over Surveillance to Profiling Errors
Second, it is important to understand that, in addition to the concerns over its manipulative capabilities, on which the chapter focused so far, emotional AI and its employment equally require to take into consideration potential harmful affective impacts, on the one hand, and potential profiling errors, on the other. In relation to the former (the latter are discussed later), it is well-known that surveillance may cause a chilling effect on behaviourFootnote 50 and, in this way, encroach on our rights to freedom of expression (Article 10 ECHR; Article 10 CFREU), freedom of assembly and association (Article 11 ECRH; Article 12 CFREU), and – to the extent that our moral integrity is at stake – our right to private life and personal identity (Article 8 ECHR; Article 7 CFREU).Footnote 51 Significantly, as noted by Calo, ‘[e]ven where we know intellectually that we are interacting with an image or a machine, our brains are hardwired to respond as though a person were actually there’.Footnote 52 The mere observation or perception of surveillance can have a chilling effect on behaviour.Footnote 53 As argued by Stanley (in the context of video analytics), one of the most worrisome concerns is ‘the possibility of widespread chilling effects as we all become highly aware that our actions are being not just recorded and stored, but scrutinized and evaluated on a second-by-second’ basis.Footnote 54 Moreover, such monitoring can also have an impact on an individual’s ability to ‘self-present’.Footnote 55 This refers to the ability of individuals to present multifaceted versions of themselves,Footnote 56 and thus behave differently depending on the circumstances.Footnote 57 Emotion detection arguably adds a layer of intimacy-invasion via the capacity to not only detect emotions as expressed but also detect underlying emotions that are being deliberately disguised. This is of particular significance, as it not only limits the capacity to self-present but potentially erodes this capacity entirely. This could become problematic if such technologies and the outlined technological capacity become commonplace.Footnote 58 In that regard, it is important to understand that emotional AI can have an impact on an individual’s capacity to self-present irrespective of its accuracy (i.e., what is important is that the individual’s belief or the mere observation or perception of surveillance can have a chilling effect on behaviour).Footnote 59
The lack of accuracy of emotional AI, resulting in profiling errors and incorrect inferences, presents additional risks of harm,Footnote 60 including inconvenience, embarrassment, or even material or physical harm.Footnote 61 In this context, it is particularly important that a frequently adopted approachFootnote 62 for emotion detection relies on the six basic emotions as indicated by Ekman (i.e., happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust). However, this classification is heavily criticized as not accurately reflecting the complex nature of an affective state.Footnote 63 The other major approaches for detecting emotions, namely the dimensional and appraisal-based approach, also present challenges of their own.Footnote 64 As Stanley puts it, emotion detection is an area where there is a special reason to be sceptical, since many such efforts spiral into ‘a rabbit hole of naïve technocratic simplification based on dubious beliefs about emotions’.Footnote 65 The AI Now Institute at New York University alerts (in the light of facial recognition) that new technologies reactivate ‘a long tradition of physiognomy – a pseudoscience that claims facial features can reveal innate aspects of our character and personality’ – and emphasizes that contextual, social, and cultural factors play a larger role in emotional expression than was believed by Ekman and his peers.Footnote 66 Leaving the point that emotion detection through facial expressions is a pseudoscience to one side, improving the accuracy of emotion detection more generally may arguably require more invasive surveillance to gather more contextual insights and signals, paradoxically creating additional difficulties from a privacy perspective. Building on the revealed circumstances, the risks associated with profiling are strongly related to the fact that the databases being mined for inferences are often ‘out-of-context, incomplete or partially polluted’, resulting in the risk of false positives and false negatives.Footnote 67 This risk remains unaddressed by the individual participation rights approach in the EU data protection framework. Indeed, while the rights of access, correction, and erasure as evident in the EU General Data Protection Regulation may have theoretical significance, the practical operation of these rights requires significant effort and is becoming increasingly difficult.Footnote 68 This in turn may have a significant impact on the enjoyment of key fundamental rights and freedoms, such as inter alia the right to respect for private and family life and protection of personal data (Article 8 ECHR; Articles 7–8 CFREU); equality and non-discrimination (Article 14 ECHR; Articles 20–21 CFREU); and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (Article 9 ECHR; Article 10 CFREU); but also – and this brings us to our third observation – the underlying key notions of autonomy and human dignity.
Getting to the Core Values: Autonomy and Human Dignity
Both at the EU and Council of Europe level, institutions have stressed that new technologies should be designed in such a way that they preserve human dignity and autonomy – both physical and psychological: ‘the design and use of persuasion software and of ICT or AI algorithms … must fully respect the dignity and human rights of all users’.Footnote 69 Manipulation of choice can inherently interfere with autonomy.Footnote 70 Although the notion of autonomy takes various meanings and conceptions, based on different philosophical, ethical, legal, and other theories,Footnote 71 for the purposes of this chapter, the Razian interpretation of autonomy is adopted, as it recognizes the need to facilitate an environment in which individuals can act autonomously.Footnote 72 According to Razian legal philosophy, rights are derivatives of autonomyFootnote 73 and, in contrast with the traditional liberal approach, autonomy requires more than simple non-interference. Raz’s conception of autonomy does not preclude the potential for positive regulatory intervention to protect individuals and enhance their freedom. In fact, such positive action is at the core of this conception of autonomy, as a correct interpretation must allow effective choice in reality, thus at times requiring regulatory intervention.Footnote 74 Raz argues that certain regulatory interventions which support certain activities and discourage those which are undesirable ‘are required to provide the conditions of autonomy’.Footnote 75 According to Raz, ‘[a]utonomy is opposed to a life of coerced choices. It contrasts with a life of no choices, or of drifting through life without ever exercising one’s capacity to choose. Evidently the autonomous life calls for a certain degree of self-awareness. To choose one must be aware of one’s options.’Footnote 76 Raz further asserts: ‘Manipulating people, for example, interferes with their autonomy, and does so in much the same way and to the same degree, as coercing them. Resort to manipulation should be subject to the same conditions as resort to coercion.’Footnote 77 Hence the manipulation of choice can inherently interfere with autonomy, and one can conclude that through this lens, excessive persuasion also runs afoul of autonomy.Footnote 78
Autonomy is inherent in the operation of the democratic values, which are protected at the foundational level by fundamental rights and freedoms. However, there is no express reference to a right to autonomy or self-determination in either the ECHR or the CFREU. Despite not being expressly recognized in a distinct ECHR provision, the European Court of Human Rights (further ‘ECtHR’) has ruled on several occasions that the protection of autonomy comes within the scope of Article 8 ECHR,Footnote 79 which specifies the right to respect for private and family life. This connection has been repeatedly illustrated in the ECtHR jurisprudence dealing with individuals’ fundamental life choices, including inter alia in relation to sexual preferences/orientation, and personal and social life (i.e., including a person’s interpersonal relationships). Such cases illustrate the role played by the right to privacy in the development of one’s personality through self-realization and autonomy (construed broadly).Footnote 80 The link between the right to privacy and autonomy is thus strong, and therefore, although privacy and autonomy are not synonyms,Footnote 81 it may be reasonably argued that the right to privacy currently offers an avenue for protection of autonomy (as evidenced by the ECtHR case law).Footnote 82 The emergence of emotional AI and the detection of emotions in real time through emotion surveillance challenges the two strands of the right simultaneously, namely (1) privacy as seclusion or intimacy through the detection of emotions and (2) privacy as freedom of action, self-determination, and autonomy via their monetization.Footnote 83
Dignity, similar to autonomy, cannot be defined easily. The meaning of the word is by no means straightforward, and its relationship with fundamental rights is unclear.Footnote 84 The Rathenau Institute has touched upon this issue, noting that technologies are likely to interfere with other rights if the use of technologies interferes with human dignity.Footnote 85 However, there is little or no consensus as to what the concept of human dignity demands of lawmakers and adjudicators, and as noted by O’Mahony, as a result, many commentators argue that it is at best meaningless or unhelpful, and at worst potentially damaging to the protection of human rights.Footnote 86 Whereas a full examination of the substantive content of the concept is outside the scope of this chapter, it can be noted that human dignity, despite being interpreted differently due to cultural differences,Footnote 87 is considered to be a central value underpinning the entirety of international human rights law,Footnote 88 one of the core principles of fundamental rights,Footnote 89 and the basis of most of the values emphasized in the ECHR.Footnote 90 Although the ECHR itself does not explicitly mention human dignity,Footnote 91 its importance has been highlighted in several legal sources related to the ECHR, including the case law of ECtHR and various documents of the CoE.Footnote 92 Human dignity is also explicitly recognized as the foundation of all fundamental rights guaranteed by the CFREU,Footnote 93 and its role was affirmed by the Court of Justice of the EU (further ‘CJEU’).Footnote 94
With regard to its substantive content, it can be noted that as O’Mahony argues, perhaps the most universally recognized aspects of human dignity are equal treatment and respect.Footnote 95 In the context of emotional AI, it is particularly relevant that although human dignity shall not be considered as a right itself,Footnote 96 it is the source of the right to personal autonomy and self-determination (i.e., the latter are derived from the underlying principle of human dignity).Footnote 97 As noted by Feldman, there is arguably no human right which is unconnected to human dignity; however, ‘some rights seem to have a particularly prominent role in upholding human dignity’, and these include the right to be free of inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to respect for private and family life, the right to freedom of conscience and belief, the right to freedom of association, the right to marry and found a family, and the right to be free of discriminatory treatment.Footnote 98 Feldman argues that, apart from freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, these rights are ‘not principally directed to protecting dignity and they are more directly geared to protecting the interests in autonomy, equality and respect’.Footnote 99 However, it is argued that these interests – autonomy, equality, and respect – are important in providing circumstances in which ‘dignity can flourish’, whereas rights which protect them usefully serve as a cornerstone of dignity.Footnote 100 In relation to this, since the employment of emotional AI may pose threats to these rights (e.g., to the right to respect for private and family life, as illustrated above, or to the right to be free of discriminatory treatment),Footnote 101 in essence it may pose threats to human dignity, respectively. To illustrate, one may refer to the analysis of live facial recognition technologies by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (further ‘FRA’),Footnote 102 emphasizing that the processing of facial images may affect human dignity in different ways.Footnote 103 According to FRA, human dignity may be affected, for example, when people feel uncomfortable going to certain places or events, change their behaviours, or withdraw from social life. The ‘impact on what people may perceive as surveillance technologies on their lives may be so significant as to affect their capacity to live a dignified life’.Footnote 104 FRA argues that the use of facial recognition can have a negative impact on people’s dignity and, relatedly, may pose threats to (rights to) privacy and data protection.Footnote 105
To summarize, the deployment of emotional AI in a business-to-consumer context necessitates a debate at a fundamental, constitutional level. Although it may benefit both businesses and consumers (e.g., by providing revenues and consumer satisfaction respectively), it has functional weaknessesFootnote 106 and also begs for the revealed legal considerations. Aside from the obvious privacy and data protection concerns, from the consumer’s perspective, individual autonomy and human dignity as overarching values may be at risk. Influencing activities evidently interfere not only with an individual’s autonomy and self-determination, but also with the individual’s freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.Footnote 107 It may be clear, as the CoE’s Committee of Ministers has noted, that also in other contexts (e.g., political campaigning), fine-grained, subconscious, and personalized levels of algorithmic persuasion may have significant effects on the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their right to form opinions and take independent decisions.Footnote 108 As a result, not only the exercise and enjoyment of individual human rights may be weakened, but also democracy and the rule of law may be threatened, as they are equally grounded on the fundamental belief in the equality and dignity of all humans as independent moral agents.Footnote 109
4.3 Suggestions to Introduce New (Constitutional) Rights
In the light of the previously noted factors, it comes as no surprise that some authors have discussed or suggested the introduction of some novel rights, in order to reinforce the existing legal arsenal.Footnote 110 Although both autonomy and dignity as relevant underlying values and some relevant rights such as right to privacy, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression are protected by the ECHR, some scholars argue that the ECHR does not offer sufficient protection in the light of the manipulative capabilities of emotional AI.Footnote 111 The subsequent paragraphs portray, in a non-exhaustive manner, such responses that concern the introduction of some new (constitutional) rights.
A first notable (American) scholar is Shoshana Zuboff, who has argued (in a broader context of surveillance capitalism)Footnote 112 for the ‘right to the future tense’. As noted by Zuboff, ‘we now face the moment in history when the elemental right to future tense is endangered’ by digital architecture of behavioural modification owned and operated by ‘surveillance capital’.Footnote 113 According to Zuboff, current legal frameworks as mostly centred on privacy and antitrust have not been sufficient to prevent undesirable practices,Footnote 114 including the exploitation of technologies for manipulative purposes. The author argues for the laws that reject the fundamental legitimacy of certain practices,
including the illegitimate rendition of human experience as behavioral data; the use of behavioural surplus as free raw material; extreme concentrations of the new means of production; the manufacture of prediction products; trading in behavioral futures; the use of prediction products for third-party operations of modification, influence and control; the operations of the means of behavioural modification; the accumulation of private exclusive concentrations of knowledge (the shadow text); and the power that such concentrations confer.Footnote 115
While arguing about the rationale of the so-called right to the future tense, the author relies on the importance of free will (i.e., Zuboff argues that in essence manipulation eliminates the freedom to will). Consequently, there is no future without the freedom to will, and there are no subjects but only ‘objects’.Footnote 116 As the author puts it, ‘the assertion of freedom of will also asserts the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life’.Footnote 117 While arguing for the recognition of such a right as a human right, Zuboff relies on Searle, who argues that elemental rights are crystallized as formal human rights only at that moment in history when they come under systematic threat. Hence, given the development of surveillance capitalism, it is necessary to recognize it as a human right. To illustrate, Zuboff argues that no one is recognizing, for example, a right to breathe because it is not under attack, which cannot be said about the right to the future tense.Footnote 118
German scholar Jan Christoph Bublitz argues for the ‘right to cognitive liberty’ (phrased alternatively a ‘right to mental self-determination’), relying in essence on the fact that the right to freedom of thought has been insignificant in practice, despite its theoretical importance.Footnote 119 Bublitz calls for the law to redefine the right to freedom of thought in terms of its theoretical significance in light of technological developments capable of altering thoughts.Footnote 120 The author argues that such technological developments require the setting of normative boundaries ‘to secure the freedom of the forum internum’.Footnote 121
In their report for the Council of Europe analyzing human rights in the robot age, Dutch scholars Rinie van Est and Joost Gerritsen from the Rathenau Institute suggest reflecting on two novel human rights, namely, the right to not be measured, analyzed or coached and the right to meaningful human contact.Footnote 122 They argue that such rights are indirectly related to and aim to elaborate on existing human rights, in particular, the classic privacy right to be let alone and the right to respect for family life (i.e., the right to establish and develop relationships with other human beings).Footnote 123 While discussing the rationale of a potential right not to be measured, analyzed, or coached, they rely on scholarly work revealing detrimental effects of ubiquitous monitoring, profiling or scoring, and persuasion.Footnote 124 They argue that what is at stake given the technological development is not only the risk of abuse but the right to remain anonymous and/or the right to be let alone, ‘which in the robot age could be phrased as the right to not be electronically measured, analyzed or coached’.Footnote 125 However, their report ultimately leaves it unclear whether they assume it is necessary to introduce the proposed rights as new formal human rights. Rather, it calls for the CoE to clarify how these rights – the right to not be measured, analyzed, or coached, and the right to meaningful human contact – could be included within the right to privacy and the right to family life respectively.Footnote 126 In addition to considering potential novel rights, the Rathenau report calls for developing fair persuasion principles, ‘such as enabling people to monitor the way in which information reaches them, and demanding that firms must be transparent about the persuasive methods they apply’.Footnote 127
According to UK scholar Karen Yeung, manipulation may threaten individual autonomy and the ‘right to cognitive sovereignty’.Footnote 128 While arguing about the rationale of such a right, Yeung relies on the importance of individual autonomy and on the Razian approach comparing manipulation to coercion,Footnote 129 as discussed previously. In addition, Yeung relies on Nissenbaum, who observes that the risks of manipulation are even more acute in a digital world involving ‘pervasive monitoring, data aggregation, unconstrained publication, profiling, and segregation’, because the manipulation that deprives us of autonomy is more subtle than the world in which lifestyle choices are punished and explicitly blocked.Footnote 130 When it comes to arguing about the need to introduce a new formal human right, Yeung notes that human dignity and individual autonomy are not sufficiently protected by Articles 8, 9, and 10 of the ECHR; however, the study in question does not provide detailed arguments in that regard. The author also refrains from elaborating on the content of such a right.Footnote 131
Some novel rights are discussed at the institutional level as well. For example, the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly has proposed working on guidelines which would cover, among other things, the recognition of some new rights, including the right not to be manipulated.Footnote 132
Further research is undoubtedly necessary to assess whether the current legal framework is not already capable of accommodating the developments properly. While the introduction of novel constitutional rights may indeed contribute to defining normative beacons, we should at the same time be cautious not to dilute the significance of constitutional rights by introducing new ones that could, in fact, be considered as manifestations of existing constitutional rights.Footnote 133 Hence, it is particularly important to delineate, as noted by Clifford, between primary and secondary law, and to assess the capabilities of the latter in particular.Footnote 134 In other words, it is necessary to exercise restraint and consider what already exists and also to delineate between rights and the specific manifestation of these rights in their operation and/or in secondary law protections (i.e., derived sub-rights). For example, key data subject rights like the right to erasure, object, access, and portability are all manifestations of the aim of respecting the right to data protection as balanced with other rights and interests. Admittedly, while the right to data protection has been explicitly recognized as a distinct fundamental right in the CFREU, this is not the case in the context of the ECHR, where the ECtHR has interpreted the right to privacy in Article 8 ECHR as encompassing informational privacy.Footnote 135 The rich debate on the relation between the right to privacy and the right to data protection, and how this impacts secondary law like the GDPR and Convention 108+, clearly exceeds the scope of this chapter.Footnote 136
4.4 Blueprint for a Future Research Agenda
The field of affective computing, and more specifically the technologies capable of detecting, classifying, and responding to emotions – in this chapter referred to as emotional AI – hold promises in many application sectors, for instance, for patient well-being in the health sector, for road safety, consumer satisfaction in retail sectors, and so forth. But, just like most (if not all) other forms of artificial intelligence, emotional AI brings with it a number of challenges and calls for assessing whether the existing legal frameworks are capable of accommodating the developments properly. Due to its manipulative capabilities, its potential harmful affective impact and potential profiling errors, emotional AI puts pressure on a whole range of constitutional rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life, non-discrimination, and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Moreover, the deployment of emotional AI poses challenges to individual autonomy and human dignity as underlying values underpinning the entirety of international human rights law, as well as to the underlying rationality-based paradigm imbued in law.
Despite the constitutional protection already offered at the European level, some scholars argue, in particular in the context of the ECHR, that this framework does not offer sufficient protection in light of the manipulative capabilities of emotional AI. They suggest (contemplating or introducing) novel rights such as the right to the future tense; the right to cognitive liberty (or, alternatively, the right to mental self-determination); the right to not be measured, analyzed, or coached; the right to cognitive sovereignty; and the right not to be manipulated.
At the same time, it should be noted that the field of constitutional law (in this chapter meant to cover the field of European human rights law) is a very dynamic area that is further shaped through case law, along with societal, economic, and technological developments. The way in which the ECtHR has given a multifaceted interpretation of the right to privacy in Article 8 ECHR is a good example of this.
This motivates the relevance of further research into the scope of existing constitutional rights and secondary sub-rights, in order to understand whether there is effectively a need to introduce new constitutional rights. A possible blueprint for IACL’s Research Group ‘Algorithmic State, Society and Market – Constitutional Dimensions’ could include
empirical research into the effects of fine-grained, subconscious, and personalised levels of algorithmic persuasion based on affective computing (in general or for specific categories of vulnerable groups, like childrenFootnote 137);
interdisciplinary research into the rise of new practices, such as the trading or renting of machine learning models for emotion classification, which may escape the traditional legal protection frameworks;Footnote 138
doctrinal research into the scope and limits of existing constitutional rights at European level in light of affective computing; Article 9 ECHR and Article 8 CFREU seem particularly interesting from that perspective;
comparative research, on the one hand, within the European context into constitutional law traditions and interpretations at the national level (think of Germany, where the right to human dignity is explicitly recognised in Article 1 Grundgesetz, versus Belgium or France, where this is not the case), and on the other hand, within the global context (comparing, for instance, the fundamental rights orientated approach to data protection in the EU and the more market-driven approach in other jurisdiction such as the US and AustraliaFootnote 139); and
policy research into the level of jurisdiction, and type of instrument, best suited to tackle the various challenges that emotional AI brings with it. (Is there, for instance, a need for a type of ‘Oviedo Convention’ in relation to (emotional) AI?)
At the beginning of this chapter, reference was made to the CoE’s Declaration on the Manipulative Capabilities of Algorithmic Processes of February 2019.Footnote 140 In that Declaration, the Committee of Ministers invites member States to
initiat[e], within appropriate institutional frameworks, open-ended, informed and inclusive public debates with a view to providing guidance on where to draw the line between forms of permissible persuasion and unacceptable manipulation. The latter may take the form of influence that is subliminal, exploits existing vulnerabilities or cognitive biases, and/or encroaches on the independence and authenticity of individual decision-making.
Aspiring to deliver a modest contribution to this much-needed debate, this chapter has set the scene and hopefully offers plenty of food for thought for future activities of the IACL Research Group on Algorithmic State Market & Society – Constitutional Dimensions.
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