This week there have been a few stories in the tech news around social media research ethics. These range from the controversial Kirkegaard and Bjerrekær case involving data scraping from OK Cupid and subsequent public release, to new UK Cabinet Office guidelines on Data Science ethics and a new report from the Council for Big…

Recently I was invited to a Royal Holloway workshop on Cybersecurity and the Internet of Things, both as a speaker and then as a panellist. Despite getting caught up in London train issues (5th May saw huge delays getting anywhere from Waterloo station), I was glad to get there eventually. It was a great line up,…

Last week I presented at the 7th Biannual Surveillance Studies Network Conference: Surveillance: Power, Performance and Trust in sunny Barcelona. This international conference, hosted at University of Barcelona, is the biggest in the field of surveillance studies, itself a growing multidisciplinary domain. Over 4 days, as you can imagine, a lot of ground was covered.…

This week I’ve been at the 31st Annual Conference of the British and Irish Legal Education and Technology Association. This is the biggest conference of the Information Technology Law community in the UK, and had a great line up this year. The remit of the conference is broad. A Storify feed from the conference gives…

Alongside BILETA 2016, I’ve another conference coming up in April: Surveillance and Society 2016. I will presenting a paper “Regulation by Design for Ambient Domestic Computing: Lessons from Human Computer Interaction”. I’ll post how it was afterwards, but for now the abstract is below: This paper will look at the role of design in addressing regulatory…

I’ve uploaded a new working paper onto SSRN. This is with Prof Tom Rodden and draws on work from the theoretical part of my PhD. The paper is called “A Legal Turn in HCI: Towards Regulation by Design for Internet of Things”. There is a lot in this paper so I’m going to pull out some of…

Last month I taught a class on an Advanced Research Methods and Ethics course at Nottingham. It was for first year Horizon PhD students and I was teaching about current issues and trends in data protection law. The class was not of lawyers but students from across a wide spectrum of backgrounds e.g psychology, sociology, computer science, business,…

I recently found out my abstract has been reviewed and accepted to BILETA 2016. I’ll be presenting there in April 2016, and will have more details once the programme is finalised. This is a major UK Information Technology Law Conference, hosted at the University of Herefordshire this year, and it is normally a great event.…

Privacy by design is a great idea, but it needs a push to move it from theory into practice. Even with willingness, doing privacy by design is hard. It requires commitment to understand the practices, terminology and epistemic commitments of ordinarily distinct communities. To help this process,  we throw an offering into the ring: information privacy cards. We’re using these over the next year…

A pre publication copy of a book chapter I’ve written for Prof Lilian Edwards upcoming book, Law, Policy and the Internet, is now available online at SSRN. “Privacy and Freedom of the Press from 2004-2015: From Campbell to Leveson” The chapter documents the developments in the English law of breach of confidence since the seminal Campbell v…