Reflections on Big Data and International Law

The Big Data Revolution is deeply impacting our lives and our society, bringing benefits to the economic sphere, impacting decision making processes, shifting power and entailing risks for privacy and human development. This happens because algorithms, far from being neutral, reflect embedded choices about data, connections, inferences, interpretations, and thresholds for inclusion which are ”political” in nature and should therefore be subject to legal scrutiny. International law has to deal with the Big Data phenomenon not only from the viewpoint of seeking a tentative regulation but also, and more radically, from the viewpoint of the structure of its sources, how they work and evolve and the way the protection of human rights is accomplished. As the impact of Big Data and Data Analytics on our society is huge and unprecedented, a paradigm shift is needed that might lead from individual rights to a truly collective dimension of the protection. Indeed, if technology, through Big Data, is fostering a quantum leap in our society, the same shift should be required also in normative terms, in each and every sector affected by Big Data: international law, in general, and international economic law in particular, are no exception.