Book excerpt: Profiling the European citizen: why today's democracy needs to look harder at the negative potential of new technology than at its positive potential. This book contains detailed and nuanced contributions on the technologies, the ethics and law of machine learning and profiling, mostly avoiding the term AI. There is no doubt that these technologies have an important positive potential, and a token reference to such positive potential, required in all debates between innovation and precaution, hereby precedes what follows.