**Requested PDF/A** A legal and technical assessment of the rights to information and an explanation

Abstract

This thesis explores why automated individual decision-making attracts the obligations of information and explanation, what these rights entail and how users of these automated processes may implement them, as referred to in the European General Data Protection Regulation. This thesis also explores why these data processing practices deserve special legal consideration when equivalent non-automated decisions are free from these onerous obligations. The problem at the heart of this thesis is the automation of everyday and high-consequence decision-making processes and the challenges and risks such technological transformation poses to the rights, freedoms, and legitimate interests of individuals. Particular relevance is given to the complexity and lack of neutrality that are introduced in decision-making through the automation of the process. This thesis provides an overview of the legal cases and disputes involving automated decisions reaching a court or a national Data Protection Authority (DPA) in a European member state. Likewise, this thesis provides both a doctrinal and a normative framework of the rights to information and an explanation that examine the legal foundations, rationale and intention of these obligations. This thesis also reflects on the distinction between explainability requirements for automated decision-making systems from a legal and a technical perspective and presents the most desirable properties technical and legal information and explanations about automated decision-making processes should attain according to both notions. Finally, this thesis examines the suitability of three concrete types of technical explainability methods to comply with the rights to information and an explanation. The expectations, reasoning, and rules exposed by a group of legal experts and practitioners regarding these explanations are complemented with an assessment of those same explanations using the doctrinal, normative frameworks and desirable properties proposed beforehand in the thesis.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Alejandra Bringas Colmenarejo: orcid.org/0000-0002-7968-9853

ORCID for Uta Kohl: orcid.org/0000-0002-8616-9469

ORCID for Stephanie Law: orcid.org/0000-0003-2551-7615

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