  Computing, like other technologies, adds an additional layer of complexity to determining whether someone is free to act, as it affects the choices that humans have and how they make them. One of the biggest application areas of computing is the automation of decision-making processes and control. Automation can help to centralize and increase control over multiple processes for those in charge, while it limits the discretionary power of human operators on the lower-end of the decision-making chain. An example is provided by the automation of decision-making in public administration (Bovens and Zouridis 2002). Large public sector organizations have over the last few decades progressively standardized and formalized their production processes. The process of issuing decisions about student loans, speeding tickets or tax returns is carried out almost entirely by computer systems. This has reduced the scope of the administrative discretion that many officials, such as tax inspectors, welfare workers, and policy officers, have in deciding how to apply formal policy rules in individual cases. Citizens no longer interact with officials that have significant responsibility in applying their knowledge of the rules and regulations to decide what is appropriate (e.g., would it be better to let someone off with a warning or is a speeding ticket required?). Rather, decisions are pre-programmed in the algorithms that apply the same measures and rules regardless of the person or the context (e.g., a speeding camera does not care about the context). Responsibility for decisions made, in these cases, has moved from ‘street-level bureaucrats’ to the ‘system-level bureaucrats’, such as managers and computer experts, that decide on how to convert policy and legal frameworks into algorithms and decision-trees.