Information control and cognitive sovereignty in the age of surveillance capitalism: How will the General Data Protection Regulation and the proposed ePrivacy Regulation provide safeguards to privacy?

Abstract

This paper examines whether the GDPR and the proposed EPR is adequate to safeguard individuals’ rights to privacy in the age of surveillance capitalism. This paper highlights the extreme asymmetries of information and power between individuals and surveillance capitalists, in order to analyze the huge impact of surveillance capitalism on the individuals’ rights to privacy. In addition to the growing concerns of individuals’ limited control of personal information, surveillance capitalism is wielding the tremendous technical and financial power to jeopardize individuals’ capacity to sense privacy invasions and make self-determined decisions. In this context, the notion of information control as one aspect of privacy and the notion of cognitive sovereignty will be used to justify the loss of privacy. After a critical analysis of relevant rights and standards set forth in the GDPR, this paper argues that the GDPR can not sufficiently address the privacy related risks in the extraordinary imbalanced environment created by surveillance capitalism. In this regard, the proposed EPR can complement the GDPR to some extent. Nonetheless, the latest version of the EPR proposal could not mitigate the information and power asymmetries in a significant way. Therefore, this paper concludes by suggesting that the GDPR and probably also the forthcoming EPR need to be complemented by new rules and other legal instruments, in order to ensure individuals’ control over privacy in the surveillance capitalism era.