Karen Yeung
Biographic Data
| ID | 2447916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karen Yeung |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karen |
| FAMILY NAME | Yeung |
| SIGNATURE | YEUNG K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9241-8134 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 219 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Dispelling the Digital Enchantment
This paper outlines the content and contours of a fictional tale called the ‘Digital Enchantment’, based on the author’s observations and experience of high-level policy discussions concerning digital policy and regulation as an academic lawyer with expertise in the governance of emerging technology. Peddled primarily by technology industry representatives, the Digital Enchantment captured the imagination of many contemporary policy-makers from t…
The death of law? Computationally personalized norms and the rule of law
The emergent power of big data analytics makes it possible to replace impersonal general legal rules with personalized, particular norms. We consider arguments that such a move would be generally beneficial, replacing crude, general laws with more efficiently targeted ways of meeting public policy goals and satisfying personal preferences. Those proposals pose a radical, new challenge to the rule of law. Data-driven legal personalization offers s…
Algorithmic regulation
This paper offers a critical synthesis of the articles in this Special Issue with a view to assessing the concept of “algorithmic regulation” as a mode of social coordination and control articulated by Yeung in 2017. We highlight significant changes in public debate about the role of algorithms in society occurring in the last five years. We also highlight prominent themes that emerge from the contributions, illuminating what is distinctive about…
Demystifying the modernized European data protection regime
This article critically examines fundamental aspects of the recently reformed European regime for protection of personal data, focusing on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the European Union (EU) in 2016. Although the GDPR is now a central concern for many organizations across multiple sectors, many complain that it is arcane, confusing, and complex. By combining knowledge from two disciplinary perspectives – from regulato…
Regulation by Blockchain
This paper critically examines the intersection and interactions between conventional law produced and enforced by national legal systems (ie the ‘code of law’) and the internal rules of blockchain systems, which take the form of executable software code and cryptographic algorithms operating across a distributed computing network (‘code as law’). In so doing, it seeks to identify whether, and to what extent, ‘regulation by blockchain’ will succe…
Algorithmic regulation
Innovations in networked digital communications technologies, including the rise of “Big Data,” ubiquitous computing, and cloud storage systems, may be giving rise to a new system of social ordering known as algorithmic regulation. Algorithmic regulation refers to decisionmaking systems that regulate a domain of activity in order to manage risk or alter behavior through continualcomputationalgeneration of knowledge by systematically collecting da…
Five fears about mass predictive personalization in an age of surveillance capitalism
Contemporary production and consumption practices are currently being transformed in ways that depart radically from those which characterized the pre-digital, networked age. Indeed, many commentators claim that the 'New Industrial Revolution' that is now dawning will provoke changes across every aspect of social life of a magnitude and scale as disruptive and far-reaching as those brought about by the original Industrial Revolution.1 While there…
Precaution in the Governance of Technology
Strong political pressures mean that few issues in international governance of science and technology are more misunderstood than the precautionary principle. Often accused of being ‘anti-science’, precaution simply acknowledges that not all uncertainties can be artificially aggregated to ‘risk’. ‘Real-world’ imperatives for justification, acceptance, trust, and blame management unscientifically suppress the indeterminacies, complexities, and var…
Trade, Commerce, and Employment
The technology of production shapes the employment relationship and important issues in its regulation. The new information technology has transformed the organization of production replacing large vertically organized firms governed by the internal labour market with horizontally organized firms governed by a global labour market. These changes require policymakers to broaden the definitions of ‘employee’, ‘employer’, and ‘appropriate bargaining…
Surveillance Theory and its Implications for Law
This chapter provides an overview of key surveillance theories and their implications for law and regulation. It presents three stages of theories that characterize changes in thinking about surveillance in society and the disciplining, controlling, and entertaining functions of surveillance. Beginning with Bentham’s Panopticons and Foucault’s panopticism to discipline surveillees, surveillance theory then develops accounts of surveillant assembl…
Data Mining as Global Governance
Data mining technologies are increasingly prominent in development and aid initiatives in which context they may be understood to be doing work of global governance. This chapter explains how data mining may be so characterized and explores how this work may be compared to more conventional governance techniques and institutions. The chapter first provides an overview of some exemplary initiatives among international institutions in which data mi…
Hardwiring Privacy
This chapter examines regulatory efforts to ensure that due account is taken of privacy and related interests in the development of information systems such that these interests are, in effect, integrated (or ‘hardwired’) into the resulting systems. Such efforts are typically described in terms of ‘Privacy by Design’ and ‘Data Protection by Design’. The basic argument advanced in the chapter is that such efforts are unlikely to gain broad tractio…
Human Rights and Information Technologies
The social changes brought about by the deployment of information technologies are wide-ranging and fundamental. A human rights analysis of such technologically driven changes shows how they implicate significant opportunities as well as risks. The chapter argues that human rights are a core aspect of regulating such technologies, particularly as human rights provide a unifying purposive perspective for diverse technologies and deployment context…
Liberal Democratic Regulation and Technological Advance
This chapter considers an array of new technologies developed for bulk collection and data analysis that are sometimes connected by critics with mass surveillance. While the use of such technologies can be compatible with democratic principles, the NSA’s system of bulk collection has been likened to that practised by the Stasi in the former German Democratic Republic. Drawing on Pettit’s concept of domination, we dispute the comparison, conceding…
Regulating Workplace Technology
The development of workplace technology has tended to reflect the interests of employers in promoting profitability, whereas worker concerns have been acknowledged in legislation that restricts the most egregious of employer practices. This chapter explores that history and the current legal and regulatory framework, which is explicable with reference to resistance. However, it is suggested that we could also view technology in the workplace as p…
The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology
This book brings together leading scholars from law and other disciplines to explore the relationship between law, technological innovation, and regulatory governance. It is organized into five parts. Part I provides an overview of the volume, identifies its aims, explains its organization, locates it within existing scholarship, and identifies major themes that emerge from the individual chapter contributions. Part II examines core normative val…
‘Hypernudge’
This paper draws on regulatory governance scholarship to argue that the analytic phenomenon currently known as ‘Big Data’ can be understood as a mode of ‘design-based’ regulation. Although Big Data decision-making technologies can take the form of automated decision-making systems, this paper focuses on algorithmic decision-guidance techniques. By highlighting correlations between data items that would not otherwise be observable, these technique…
The Forms and Limits of Choice Architecture as a Tool of Government
Although the use of design‐based control techniques, broadly understood as the purposeful shaping of the environment and the things and beings within it toward particular ends, have been used throughout human history, until the publication of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, they have remained relatively neglected as a focus of regulatory scholarship. Nudge can be understood as a design‐based regulatory technique because it provides the means by whic…
Nudge as Fudge
Why is UK medicine no longer a self-regulating profession? The role of scandals involving "bad apple" doctors
Design-based regulation and patient safety
Presentational Management and the Pursuit of Regulatory Legitimacy
Independent regulatory agencies, faced with multiple and often conflicting demands from regulatory stakeholders, yet operating at arm’s length from government, may be under considerable pressure to demonstrate the legitimacy of their decisions and the regime they administer. This article considers how regulators employ presentational strategies to establish and maintain their legitimacy by documenting the findings of a comparative study of two in…
Does the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Engage in “Trial by Media
In recent years, heated debate has arisen concerning the media practices of Australia's competition and consumer regulator (“the ACCC”), with a number of industry leaders asserting that the ACCC engages in “trial by media.” The public disquiet surrounding the ACCC's use of the media was so significant that the Australian Parliament established an independent committee of inquiry (“the Dawson Inquiry”) to investigate (amongst other things) whether…
Algorithmic regulation
Innovations in networked digital communications technologies, including the rise of “Big Data,” ubiquitous computing, and cloud storage systems, may be giving rise to a new system of social ordering known as algorithmic regulation. Algorithmic regulation refers to decisionmaking systems that regulate a domain of activity in order to manage risk or alter behavior through continualcomputationalgeneration of knowledge by systematically collecting da…
Why is UK medicine no longer a self-regulating profession? The role of scandals involving "bad apple" doctors
Algorithmic regulation
This paper offers a critical synthesis of the articles in this Special Issue with a view to assessing the concept of “algorithmic regulation” as a mode of social coordination and control articulated by Yeung in 2017. We highlight significant changes in public debate about the role of algorithms in society occurring in the last five years. We also highlight prominent themes that emerge from the contributions, illuminating what is distinctive about…
Five fears about mass predictive personalization in an age of surveillance capitalism
Contemporary production and consumption practices are currently being transformed in ways that depart radically from those which characterized the pre-digital, networked age. Indeed, many commentators claim that the 'New Industrial Revolution' that is now dawning will provoke changes across every aspect of social life of a magnitude and scale as disruptive and far-reaching as those brought about by the original Industrial Revolution.1 While there…
Presentational Management and the Pursuit of Regulatory Legitimacy
Independent regulatory agencies, faced with multiple and often conflicting demands from regulatory stakeholders, yet operating at arm’s length from government, may be under considerable pressure to demonstrate the legitimacy of their decisions and the regime they administer. This article considers how regulators employ presentational strategies to establish and maintain their legitimacy by documenting the findings of a comparative study of two in…
Demystifying the modernized European data protection regime
This article critically examines fundamental aspects of the recently reformed European regime for protection of personal data, focusing on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the European Union (EU) in 2016. Although the GDPR is now a central concern for many organizations across multiple sectors, many complain that it is arcane, confusing, and complex. By combining knowledge from two disciplinary perspectives – from regulato…
Design-based regulation and patient safety
The Forms and Limits of Choice Architecture as a Tool of Government
Although the use of design‐based control techniques, broadly understood as the purposeful shaping of the environment and the things and beings within it toward particular ends, have been used throughout human history, until the publication of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, they have remained relatively neglected as a focus of regulatory scholarship. Nudge can be understood as a design‐based regulatory technique because it provides the means by whic…
Nudge as Fudge
Regulation by Blockchain
This paper critically examines the intersection and interactions between conventional law produced and enforced by national legal systems (ie the ‘code of law’) and the internal rules of blockchain systems, which take the form of executable software code and cryptographic algorithms operating across a distributed computing network (‘code as law’). In so doing, it seeks to identify whether, and to what extent, ‘regulation by blockchain’ will succe…
Does the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Engage in “Trial by Media
In recent years, heated debate has arisen concerning the media practices of Australia's competition and consumer regulator (“the ACCC”), with a number of industry leaders asserting that the ACCC engages in “trial by media.” The public disquiet surrounding the ACCC's use of the media was so significant that the Australian Parliament established an independent committee of inquiry (“the Dawson Inquiry”) to investigate (amongst other things) whether…
Does the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Engage in “Trial by Media
In recent years, heated debate has arisen concerning the media practices of Australia's competition and consumer regulator (“the ACCC”), with a number of industry leaders asserting that the ACCC engages in “trial by media.” The public disquiet surrounding the ACCC's use of the media was so significant that the Australian Parliament established an independent committee of inquiry (“the Dawson Inquiry”) to investigate (amongst other things) whether…
Presentational Management and the Pursuit of Regulatory Legitimacy
Independent regulatory agencies, faced with multiple and often conflicting demands from regulatory stakeholders, yet operating at arm’s length from government, may be under considerable pressure to demonstrate the legitimacy of their decisions and the regime they administer. This article considers how regulators employ presentational strategies to establish and maintain their legitimacy by documenting the findings of a comparative study of two in…
Design-based regulation and patient safety
Why is UK medicine no longer a self-regulating profession? The role of scandals involving "bad apple" doctors
Nudge as Fudge
Liberal Democratic Regulation and Technological Advance
This chapter considers an array of new technologies developed for bulk collection and data analysis that are sometimes connected by critics with mass surveillance. While the use of such technologies can be compatible with democratic principles, the NSA’s system of bulk collection has been likened to that practised by the Stasi in the former German Democratic Republic. Drawing on Pettit’s concept of domination, we dispute the comparison, conceding…
Regulating Workplace Technology
The development of workplace technology has tended to reflect the interests of employers in promoting profitability, whereas worker concerns have been acknowledged in legislation that restricts the most egregious of employer practices. This chapter explores that history and the current legal and regulatory framework, which is explicable with reference to resistance. However, it is suggested that we could also view technology in the workplace as p…
The Oxford Handbook of Law, Regulation and Technology
This book brings together leading scholars from law and other disciplines to explore the relationship between law, technological innovation, and regulatory governance. It is organized into five parts. Part I provides an overview of the volume, identifies its aims, explains its organization, locates it within existing scholarship, and identifies major themes that emerge from the individual chapter contributions. Part II examines core normative val…
‘Hypernudge’
This paper draws on regulatory governance scholarship to argue that the analytic phenomenon currently known as ‘Big Data’ can be understood as a mode of ‘design-based’ regulation. Although Big Data decision-making technologies can take the form of automated decision-making systems, this paper focuses on algorithmic decision-guidance techniques. By highlighting correlations between data items that would not otherwise be observable, these technique…
The Forms and Limits of Choice Architecture as a Tool of Government
Although the use of design‐based control techniques, broadly understood as the purposeful shaping of the environment and the things and beings within it toward particular ends, have been used throughout human history, until the publication of Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, they have remained relatively neglected as a focus of regulatory scholarship. Nudge can be understood as a design‐based regulatory technique because it provides the means by whic…
Precaution in the Governance of Technology
Strong political pressures mean that few issues in international governance of science and technology are more misunderstood than the precautionary principle. Often accused of being ‘anti-science’, precaution simply acknowledges that not all uncertainties can be artificially aggregated to ‘risk’. ‘Real-world’ imperatives for justification, acceptance, trust, and blame management unscientifically suppress the indeterminacies, complexities, and var…
Trade, Commerce, and Employment
The technology of production shapes the employment relationship and important issues in its regulation. The new information technology has transformed the organization of production replacing large vertically organized firms governed by the internal labour market with horizontally organized firms governed by a global labour market. These changes require policymakers to broaden the definitions of ‘employee’, ‘employer’, and ‘appropriate bargaining…
Surveillance Theory and its Implications for Law
This chapter provides an overview of key surveillance theories and their implications for law and regulation. It presents three stages of theories that characterize changes in thinking about surveillance in society and the disciplining, controlling, and entertaining functions of surveillance. Beginning with Bentham’s Panopticons and Foucault’s panopticism to discipline surveillees, surveillance theory then develops accounts of surveillant assembl…
Data Mining as Global Governance
Data mining technologies are increasingly prominent in development and aid initiatives in which context they may be understood to be doing work of global governance. This chapter explains how data mining may be so characterized and explores how this work may be compared to more conventional governance techniques and institutions. The chapter first provides an overview of some exemplary initiatives among international institutions in which data mi…
Hardwiring Privacy
This chapter examines regulatory efforts to ensure that due account is taken of privacy and related interests in the development of information systems such that these interests are, in effect, integrated (or ‘hardwired’) into the resulting systems. Such efforts are typically described in terms of ‘Privacy by Design’ and ‘Data Protection by Design’. The basic argument advanced in the chapter is that such efforts are unlikely to gain broad tractio…
Human Rights and Information Technologies
The social changes brought about by the deployment of information technologies are wide-ranging and fundamental. A human rights analysis of such technologically driven changes shows how they implicate significant opportunities as well as risks. The chapter argues that human rights are a core aspect of regulating such technologies, particularly as human rights provide a unifying purposive perspective for diverse technologies and deployment context…
Algorithmic regulation
Innovations in networked digital communications technologies, including the rise of “Big Data,” ubiquitous computing, and cloud storage systems, may be giving rise to a new system of social ordering known as algorithmic regulation. Algorithmic regulation refers to decisionmaking systems that regulate a domain of activity in order to manage risk or alter behavior through continualcomputationalgeneration of knowledge by systematically collecting da…
Five fears about mass predictive personalization in an age of surveillance capitalism
Contemporary production and consumption practices are currently being transformed in ways that depart radically from those which characterized the pre-digital, networked age. Indeed, many commentators claim that the 'New Industrial Revolution' that is now dawning will provoke changes across every aspect of social life of a magnitude and scale as disruptive and far-reaching as those brought about by the original Industrial Revolution.1 While there…
Regulation by Blockchain
This paper critically examines the intersection and interactions between conventional law produced and enforced by national legal systems (ie the ‘code of law’) and the internal rules of blockchain systems, which take the form of executable software code and cryptographic algorithms operating across a distributed computing network (‘code as law’). In so doing, it seeks to identify whether, and to what extent, ‘regulation by blockchain’ will succe…
Demystifying the modernized European data protection regime
This article critically examines fundamental aspects of the recently reformed European regime for protection of personal data, focusing on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the European Union (EU) in 2016. Although the GDPR is now a central concern for many organizations across multiple sectors, many complain that it is arcane, confusing, and complex. By combining knowledge from two disciplinary perspectives – from regulato…
The death of law? Computationally personalized norms and the rule of law
The emergent power of big data analytics makes it possible to replace impersonal general legal rules with personalized, particular norms. We consider arguments that such a move would be generally beneficial, replacing crude, general laws with more efficiently targeted ways of meeting public policy goals and satisfying personal preferences. Those proposals pose a radical, new challenge to the rule of law. Data-driven legal personalization offers s…
Algorithmic regulation
This paper offers a critical synthesis of the articles in this Special Issue with a view to assessing the concept of “algorithmic regulation” as a mode of social coordination and control articulated by Yeung in 2017. We highlight significant changes in public debate about the role of algorithms in society occurring in the last five years. We also highlight prominent themes that emerge from the contributions, illuminating what is distinctive about…
Dispelling the Digital Enchantment
This paper outlines the content and contours of a fictional tale called the ‘Digital Enchantment’, based on the author’s observations and experience of high-level policy discussions concerning digital policy and regulation as an academic lawyer with expertise in the governance of emerging technology. Peddled primarily by technology industry representatives, the Digital Enchantment captured the imagination of many contemporary policy-makers from t…
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection (8 works)