“Big Data” is a phrase that has been used pervasively by the media and the lay public in the last several years. Amongst many other fields, social control and crime control in particular have become one of the key emerging use cases of big data. For example, police predictive software produce probability reports on criminality and assure us that by using this, societies will reduce crime. Other programs are looking for patterns that would help us predict a terrorist attack. Criminal justice systems are using technological solution too, for instance, to predict future crimes of those applying for bail or those to be sent on a parole. Underlying these and many other potential uses of big data in crime control, however, are a series of legal and ethical challenges relating to, among other things to privacy, discrimination, and presumption of innocence.

The leading questions the Big Data conference speaker will tackle are:

• How the operations of society, political systems, and, in particular, social control and crime control, is changing due to large data bases and algorithmic data mining and predicting powers?
• Will computers decide who to prosecute and who should be sent to jail?
• Which programmes and systems of algorithmic predictions are already in place in the criminal justice systems around the globe?
• Why this can be dangerous in terms of fundamental human rights and fundamental principles of democratic societies?
• Is the new GDPR a suitable framework for »algocracy«, i.e. rule by the algorithm?
• How can we propose solutions that may not hinder the development of the technology, but enable more nuanced, ethically and legally sound solutions to be developed in the future?