Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.

Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data, Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.
 
Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.
 
At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.Author's Note vii
Preface ix
Prologue xi
Introduction 1
Part I: Before Data
1 The Main Frame 13
2 Update Failed 33
Part II: Data, Data Everywhere 
3 The Singular-ity 59
4 (Data) Privacy, the Handmaiden 77
Part III: Beyond Data
5 A Brave New World 99
6 Against the Datafication of Life 123
7 Back to the Future: A Return to Human Rights 149
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Index 215“Beyond Data is both a compelling historical review as well as a powerful call to action, with its main strength being the latter. Although the book’s detailed explanation of the events and developments that have brought us to our current situation regarding data legislation is informative and well-explained, it is Renieris’s defence of a new understanding of human rights for a digital world which makes her work a truly compelling work.” 
– Engineering & TechnologyElizabeth M. Renieris is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. A lawyer by training, her academic research focuses on cross-border data governance and the ethical implications of emerging technologies.US