This chapter examines diverse aspects of new technologies that are disrupting traditional consumer protection. These include phenomena such as consumer profiling or commercialization of data. It can be concluded that artificial intelligence represents a particular challenge for consumer law and policy. Consumer law should be technologically neutral. Irrespective of the technology deployed, the level of consumer protection needs to be always maintained. However, consumer law requirements must never be seen as obstacles to the innovation and the development of new technologies; and establishing the right balance between these two values remains a particular challenge.

‘Stop, who goes there?’ is a precursor in World War II movies to a character presenting his papers. His identity has to be established to verify that he is not out of place, that he is authorised to be in this particular area. Who he is – his rank, age, race, or ethnicity – is of little relevance; it is much more important that he has appropriate credentials, and is therefore authorised, to pass the control point. Presenting identity papers meets the guard’s demand in this pre-digital context. Twenty-first-century digital environments still require us to submit to identification as authorisation or verification; however, these new identifications are now deeply implicated in the broader issues of identity.

Chapter 10 describes the various tools available for both profiling kernel performance and debugging code.For profiling we discuss both the older CUDA nvprof command line profiler and associated NVVP GUI and the newer Nsight Systems and Nsight Compute profilers which have many options. In particular, Nsight Compute can give detail of the performance within an individual kernel which was not possible before. Our discussion of debugging is based on the tools in Microsoft Visual Studio both for conventional C++ debugging and to enhance CUDA plugins for kernel debugging. The CUDA (Next-Gen) toolset allows line by line monitoring of individual threads during kernel execution.

This chapter explains how corporate surveillance works on a technical level: how individual users can be tracked across their use of web and mobile services, for example through stateful tracking with cookies or stateless tracking with fingerprinting; how information collected through tracking is consolidated in comprehensive user profiles; how analytics services contribute to tracking and profiling; and how advertising technology works, including ad targeting and ad sales.

This chapter examines findings from transparency research that shed light on the methods used for corporate surveillance, including tracking, profiling, analytics, and advertising. The chapter focuses on key results obtained for the research questions described in chapter 4 and explains the experimental designs used to achieve them.

Roger Fairfax analyzes LL Cool J’s 1990 song, “Illegal Search,” as a precursor to later hip-hop critiques of policing. This song represented LL Cool J’s awakening to social consciousness in the 1990s. “Illegal Search” represented helped advance a narrative about policing that remains prominent in hip-hop to this day. “Illegal Search” might have been overlooked completely since the only track to follow is “Power of God,” a low-energy, spiritual offering that, while delivering a positive message, is perhaps the least familiar of the fourteen cuts on the album.“Illegal Search” surveys a number of discrete topics, including racial profiling, the manufacture and planting of evidence, police brutality, incarceration, and even seems to reference a specific case of police misconduct in New Jersey. The lyrics display the angst experienced by many African Americans who are subjected to law enforcement scrutiny simply because of their skin color. “Illegal Search,” with its literal, unobscured narrative, gives descriptive voice to the phenomenon we would later term “Driving While Black.”

A policy of selective enforcement to realign social norms with the Nazi vision of people’s community took form in 1935. As the Gestapo dismantled the underground communist party, pursuing the remnants into society at large demanded a different approach. Nazism asserted the right to control conversation under new legal theories that treated the private as political. But blanket enforcement risked undermining popular support. To compensate, offences became forgivable momentary weakness or punishable subversion depending on motive. The Gestapo developed profiles of ideological enemies and criterion identifying upstanding “racial comrades” in response. The keystone was “political reliability” extrapolated from the suspect’s partisan associations and personal reputation. The ideals of people’s community set the parameters of respectable citizenship. Certain behaviours and associations were evidence of political reliability or inherently subversive attitudes threatening this community. Selective enforcement educated or punished based on the effect of an action upon, the standing of socio-political identities within, and the contributions of an offender toward the people’s community.

This chapter deals with how the past influences the present and the future: that is, how the personal history/biography of an individual explains the present and predicts the future. It describes in detail a very specific area in psychology assessment called biodata, which is an attempt to ‘score an application form’. While there are different methods, they all rely on giving weights to past experiences, which have been shown to predict future behaviour. It tests the claim like you can ‘see leaders in the school playground’: meaning there are many early markers of later behaviour. Much of the chapter looks at describing what does and does not constitute real biodata and the evidence for its validity as an assessment technique. The second half of the chapter looks at how psychologists have examined autobiographies, psychobiographies as well as ‘typical’ biographies to look for the clues to the motives and behaviour of individuals. Features such as birth order and the misfortunes of youth are thought to have a powerful impact on individuals. An example of this approach is the analysis done of Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

In this chapter, we look at the global development of “people-scoring” and its implications. Unlike traditional credit scoring, which is used to evaluate individuals’ financial trustworthiness, social scoring seeks to comprehensively rank individuals based on social, reputational, and behavioral attributes. The implications of widespread social scoring are far-reaching and troubling. Bias and error, discrimination, manipulation, privacy violations, excessive market power, and social segregation are only some of the concerns we have discussed and elaborated on in previous works.1 In this chapter, we describe the global shift from financial scores to social credit, and show how, notwithstanding constitutional, statutory, and regulatory safeguards, the United States and other Western democracies are not as far from social credit as we seem to believe.

Automated decision-making and profiling are becoming more prolific and changing in nature. What began with police photography and Habitual Criminal Registers has reached a new crescendo with computer vision and data science. Law has struggled to adequately regulate these technologies and practices. Where it has been successful, law constrains profiling by protecting ‘identity’. However, in the contemporary technological environment, the notions of identity that animate the legal thinking and the notions of identity that animate the data science and profiling are markedly different. This chapter introduces the argument that these contradictory ways of thinking about people is why the law has struggled to introduce meaningful regulation in this field. It introduces the metaphor of the ‘world state’, the process by which the world and the people within it are translated into the computational world, and asks what law needs to do as the world state becomes more prominent.

Boarding an afternoon flight the day before, a State Labor Minister who was also travelling handed me a copy of the Apology that he had just received from a federal colleague. He was curious about what the Koories on board the flight would make of it. Just reading it, I didn’t immediately make much of it. It was not until the following nation-setting day, standing in the gallery of Parliament House, only metres from then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, when I heard the Apology and in doing so witnessed an event that will be forever remembered in the oral history of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, that it had impact.