AI: Siege on Privacy

Speakers

• Fermín Morales Prats, author of the book. Numerary Member of the RAED. Doctor of Law
• Francisco Marco Fernández, author of the book. Corresponding Member of the RAED. Doctor of Law
• Luis de las Heras Vives, author of the book. Numerary Member of the RAED. Doctor of Law

AI: the siege of privacy

As you read these lines, artificial intelligence already knows more about you than your own family.

Three of Spain’s leading experts in privacy law come together for the first time to unravel how we have reached this point and, above all, where we are heading.

Fermín Morales Prats, Professor of Criminal Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has spent four decades studying the protection of privacy, ever since publishing his pioneering 1984 doctoral thesis on privacy and computing.

Francisco Marco Fernández, Doctor of Law and CEO of one of Spain’s leading corporate intelligence firms, provides the perspective of someone who works daily on the frontier between legitimate information and the invasion of privacy.

Luis de las Heras Vives, Doctor of Law and specialist in the criminal-law dimension of offences against digital privacy, completes a team that brings together more than a century of combined experience.

The result? A work that reveals the invisible mechanisms that erode our privacy and explains how our data have become the new gold.

Every click on “accept” is a fragment of freedom we sacrifice. Every Google search, every “like,” every journey tracked by our mobile phones builds a profile controlled by others. AI no longer merely observes what we do: it anticipates what we will do, influences what we think, and shapes who we are.

This book puts forward a new legal concept — the Data Nexus Juris — and raises an uncomfortable question: are we prepared for a future in which five corporations and a handful of algorithms control everything that we are?

It is not an indictment of technology. It is a wake-up call for AI to enlighten us rather than blind us.