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Why is Big Data absent in the recent basic data protection documents of the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe (CoE)? Why not one single reference to Big Data practices - be it to regulate or to prohibit it - in the recent General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the Data Protection Law Enforcement Directive (EU) 2016/680 and the Modernised CoE Convention 108 for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data (Convention 108+)? Some actors in the policy field considered Big Data too dan- gerous and counted on existing data protection principles to tame the beast. Others simply ignored the phenomenon or were not aware of the potential benefits of Big Data for economy and governments (the rendez-vous was missed). Our discussion of no less than six recent initiatives, - standalone laws and soft law instruments - is an indication that Europe is embracing Big Data but is seemingly hesitant to confront Big Data within the classical paradigm (field) of data protection law. Concrete guidance for Big Data practices is now spread over multiple texts emanating outside the data protection field.

After having reflected about technologies and the role of non-political guidance in EU data protection law in previous editorials, I now turn to the thorny question about the proper place of data protection law. In search of a substance, I use Murakami’s imaginary to prepare for the worst: not all things, concepts and beings are blessed with substance. After having managed (lowered) possible expectations about the essence of data protection law, I turn to a first approach to understanding data protection law as a bundle of principles. Principles are powerful legal topoi that create seriousness about legal domains. They are defended by the best scholars and much appreciated by courts in their role as judicial lawmakers. They look God-given, but are man-made. Unable to fix their number and precise nature, I will challenge them by inflating their number.

Careful to avoid uninformed positioning, I limited myself in my previous contribution to a Science & Technology Studies (STS)-flavoured stance about the need for closer scrutiny of existing or novel technologies when considering the role of law and regu- lation. Detailed accounts of individual technologies allow better assessments of pos- sible ethical dilemmas created by these technologies. Although authors disagree about the degree of moral agency of artefacts or things, most agree that these are more than simple passive instruments. Things influence us and our perceptions about good and bad. Things act and interact. They mediate and impact on our moral understandings.9 Knowledge about how things do that is not easy. Latour, in particular, criticises every ideal of knowledge and mastery in this area. Technologies simply escape mastery. They are the source of a continuous paradox for humans that praise technology for its functional utility, for its neutrality (neither good or bad) and for it being a means toan end, while these technologies never cease to introduce a history of enfoldings, detours, drifts, openings and translations that abolish ideas like ‘function’ and ‘neutrality’. Latour therefore sheds a critical light on modern humans that have acquired the habit to dominate but fail to see that there are no masters anymore, no clear distinctions between means and end that would allow to identify crazed technologies and ‘to bind back the hound of technology to its cage’. Morality and technology interact, often in unpredictable ways, and there is a need to conceive another history, another reassembly of morality and technology. How Latour conceives this reassembly in practice is not clear. A process with open- ness for predictable and unpredictable outcomes could bring about the necessary dig- nity of both morality and technology, whereby we renounce the idea of putting the first on the side of means and the second on the side of ends. Latour is no believer in contemporary mantras such as more transparency,or more accountability, assessment and evaluation of options. Wrongly applied, these approaches would lead us again to the impossible ideal of mastery and knowledge of things.