The escalating adoption of wearable technology for health data monitoring has led to the real-time aggregation of personal information. This phenomenon has fuelled heightened apprehensions about data security and privacy, given the storage, processing, and sharing of personal health data by corporations. Regulatory frameworks have been enacted to safeguard individual privacy rights, as exemplified by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This research paper, by Ms Varda Mone and Ms Fayazullaeva Shakhlo, offers an overview of extant literature on privacy apprehensions concerning wearable devices, conducting an exhaustive review to discern pivotal privacy issues and proffer prospective remedies. Specifically, the paper delineates the ensuing privacy concerns associated with wearables. Predominantly, wearables introduce security vulnerabilities that may facilitate the misappropriation, compromise, or revelation of delicate health data. The copious health information amassed by wearables can be potentially sold or divulged to external parties’ sans user cognisance or consent. Furthermore, the deployment of wearable technology harbours the potential for discriminatory practices against those with disabilities or chronic ailments. Additionally, apprehensions pertaining to privacy and surveillance stem from the capacity of wearable devices to monitor and trace an individual's movements and activities. To conclude, the paper deliberates on plausible measures to address privacy concerns pertaining to wearable devices, encompassing: a) Fortifying the security apparatus of wearable devices, b) Amplifying user autonomy over their health data, and c) Regulating the collection and utilisation of user health data by wearables. The paper asserts that the amelioration of these privacy concerns is indispensable for leveraging wearable technology's potential to enhance human well-being while ensuring the preservation of personal privacy.

Data protection law has emerged as an important bulwark against online privacy intrusions, and yet its status within privacy law remains awkward. Its starting point of protecting ‘personal’ rather than ‘private’ information puts it at odds with privacy more generally. Indeed, in its very design, data protection law caters for the protection of public personal information, or personal information which has attained a degree of publicness through disclosure. Building on James Whitman's comparative privacy study, this article argues that data protection law is not the odd bedfellow of privacy law properly so called but may be understood as a manifestation of the Continental European culture of privacy. Its distinctiveness does not lie in its apparent technicality but in its robust openness to privacy in public—an idea that is alien to the Anglo-American culture of privacy. Whilst these two cultures of privacy have long ‘met’ in different jurisdictions, this article locates their enduring influence and antagonism within three contemporary privacy regimes. By taking the right to be forgotten, as an archetypal privacy-in-public right, in the testing context of spent criminal convictions, the article gauges the comparative openness to such claims, first, of the Court of Justice of the European Union as the authoritative voice on General Data Protection Regulation normativity; secondly, of the US judiciary as committed to the First and Fourth Amendment; and, thirdly, of the European Court of Human Rights on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and its fused Anglo-American and Continental European privacy jurisprudence. It is the latter jurisprudence in particular that highlights the tensions arising from trying to marry the two privacy traditions, or merge data protection and ‘privacy’ law. Yet, these tensions also offer insights and opportunities.

Businesses increasingly rely on algorithms that are data-trained sets of decision rules (i.e., the output of the processes often called “machine learning”) and implement decisions with little or no human intermediation. In this article, we provide a philosophical foundation for the claim that algorithmic decision-making gives rise to a “right to explanation.” It is often said that, in the digital era, informed consent is dead. This negative view originates from a rigid understanding that presumes informed consent is a static and complete transaction. Such a view is insufficient, especially when data are used in a secondary, noncontextual, and unpredictable manner—which is the inescapable nature of advanced artificial intelligence systems. We submit that an alternative view of informed consent—as an assurance of trust for incomplete transactions—allows for an understanding of why the rationale of informed consent already entails a right to ex post explanation.