Suicide is a global phenomenon, with implications for HICs and LMICs alike, bec,ause of interconnectedness. Social injustice increases societies’ suicide risk and it is easily and frequently exported. Suicide is preventable but not always individually. Suicide prediction is difficult or impossible, so those measures that effect everyone work best. Hence assuring good quality, timely mental health coverage for the whole population is important. Those with the least resources must be targeted, as they are at greatest risk..

Evidence is essential to suicide prevention. Delay until the evidence base is complete is not possible, so cautious advice must be given to policy makers on imperfect evidence. This means recognising uncertainty, including the risk that the advice may cause more harm than good. Evaluation during implementation is critical but frequently neglected. The UK has a system of nationwide statistics, supplemented by a National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health (NCISH) into all apparently suicidal deaths during or after mental health care. In addition, there are recently devised real-time statistics of suspicious deaths. There is a system of self-harm registers, independent of official systems. These systems have generated unusually good information on suicidal deaths and self-harm, leading to tangible improvements. However, like all evidence, it is still imperfect.

The progressive digitalization of industries and services has direct effects on the organization of labor. Telework is foremost a consequence of the general increased use of information technology in our professional and private lives. The organizational changes of labor due to digitalization however challenge the functionality and effectiveness of labor law. The employer’s comprehensible concerns, that teleworkers might pursue private interests at home, serve in practice as a justification for implementation of closed meshed monitoring measures. Hence, we face a significant paradox: even though teleworkers enjoy a putative higher degree of autonomy because they are not present at premise and therefore not subject to the employers’ physical authority, they are exposed to a higher degree of dependency rooted in digital control measures. Data protection acquires increasing importance for workers. Labor protection in many cases cannot be separated from data protection. This chapter argues that this evolution is not sufficiently mirrored by the law, and then analyses in its first part the existing shortcomings and loopholes exemplified by the problem of digital surveillance of telework. In its second part the chapter seeks to identify possible legal mechanisms to create or even foster interaction between labor and data protection law.

Historical tensions over race and nation have bubbled over time and resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism and a “hostile environment.” British Muslim identity and belonging has been a complex process of negotiation in the British Isles and beyond. This chapter explores how transnational Muslim identities in Britain form digital interconnections and face disruptions in an increasingly securitized global architecture in which the digital serves as a place of contestation and surveillance. Through summary close readings from selected writings by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Ayisha Malik, and Zaffar Kunial, this chapter emphasizes how Muslim writers translate the limits of a national English identity for migrant groups after Brexit through new representations of enclosed spaces such as gardens and parks.

Susser provides a thoughtful examination of what we mean by (digital) exploitation and suggests that regulation should constrain platform activities that instrumentalize people or treat them unfairly. Using a diverse set of examples, he argues that the language of exploitation helps makes visible forms of injustice overlooked or only partially captured by dominant concerns about, for example, surveillance, discrimination, and related platform abuses. He provides valuable conceptual and normative resources for challenging efforts by platforms to obscure or legitimate those abuses.

The Human Rights Act requires courts to decide cases in conformity with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights in so far as possible. Employees must bring a claim under UK employment law and then the rights, whether at common law or under statute, should conform to the Convention rights such as the right to respect for private life, freedom to manifest a religion, and freedom of expression.

Since the Reagan era, American economic policy has amounted to self-colonization. Democratic majorities have consistently supported legal regimes that have enabled corporations to extract the lion’s share of the gains from trade from the public. For example, they have supported a corporate law regime that denies the public democratic control over the behavior of corporations and instead gives dictatorial powers to shareholders and managers. The Internet has made it even easier for firms to extract surpluses from consumers through surveillance and algorithmic pricing. One small contribution toward a project of decolonizing the public would be for consumers to obtain a property right in their personal information. This would allow them to claw back some of the surpluses that technology has taken from them.

Use Case 4 in Chapter 7 explores the regulation of MDTs in the context of employment monitoring under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Equality Acquis, the Platform Work Directive (PWD), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Article 88 GDPR serves as a useful foundation, supported by valuable guidance aimed at protecting employees from unlawful monitoring practices. In theory, most MDT-based practices discussed in this book are already prohibited under the GDPR. Additionally, the EU’s robust equality acquis can effectively address many forms of discrimination in this sector. The AIA reiterates some existing prohibitions related to MDT-based monitoring practices in the workplace. However, a core challenge in employment monitoring lies in ensuring transparency and enforcement. There has long been a call for a lex specialis for data protection in the employment context, which should include a blacklist of prohibited practices or processing operations, akin to the one found in the PWD. Notably, processing and inferring mind data should be included among the practices on this blacklist.

This chapter explores the prehistory of ambivalence as an embodied emotion related to human survival by examining the ambivalent reactions to plague law in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Long before the word “ambivalence” appeared in English, Defoe depicts actions and thoughts that we now think of as “ambivalent.” In the face of a deadly plague that resulted in legal regulation enabling government surveillance, Defoe’s narrator shifts loyalties as restlessly as he shifts positions, ambivalently pivoting between loyalty to the larger community as represented by the law and pursuit of his own concerns. The chapter suggests that Defoe presents ambivalence as a mode of resistance to state surveillance and control that avoids the most extreme expression of resistance, that of suicide, or as eighteenth-century law construed it, “self-murder.” Ambivalence, often thought of as a self-defeating emotion, is represented as serving a protective function, creating space for individuals to resist legal authority, neither capitulating to state control nor exercising a fatal form of resistance.

How the Shepherd conceives of human–spirit relations leads me to examine two examples of the consequences of this entanglement of spirit possession and enslavement. I point first to how the holy spirit in the Shepherd functions similarly to the Roman enslaved overseer (vilicus) who represents the physically absent enslaver and surveils other enslaved persons. The Shepherd solves the problem that despotic writers (e.g., Cato, Columella) lament regarding how to guarantee that the vilicus is not mistaken for the absentee enslaver: God becomes both the enslaver and the vilicus, the ever-present surveillance over the enslaved through spirit possession. I also focus on one tricky passage in the Shepherd, a parable about an enslaved person working on a vineyard and its complex layers of interpretations offered by the Shepherd (Similitude 5), to better understand how the Shepherd conceptualizes the relationship between the holy spirit and the flesh that it treats as a vessel. I show how the Shepherd views enslavement to the holy spirit as a necessary risk for the enslaver, since the spirit can be polluted and defiled if the enslaved body in which it dwells is not constantly maintained.