Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using algorithmic predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity and allocate police resources. For instance, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles use predictive policing systems built by private actors, such as PredPol, Palantir and Hunchlab. However, predictive policing is not a panacea to eradicate crime and many concerns raised on the inefficiency, risk of discrimination, as well as lack of transparency. The necessity of protecting fundamental rights has to be reiterated in the algorithmic society. To do it, adapted tools must be deployed to ensure proper enforcement of fundamental rights. Some ethical principles need to be put in place in order to effectively protect fundamental rights and to reinforce them. I argue that while the European constitutional and ethical framework is theoretically sufficient, other tools must be adopted to guarantee the enforcement of Fundamental Rights and Ethical Principles in practice to provide a robust framework, for keeping human rights a central place. Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) constitutes an interesting way to provide a concrete governance of automated decision-making.

This chapter addresses autonomy’s role in democratic governance. Political authority may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy, which is in turn a function of autonomy. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools.