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Chatbots and Voicebots: legal similarities and differences

The EDPB’s new Guidance on Data Protection issues around Virtual Voice Assistants (Siri, Alexa and friends) makes interesting reading, though – as I predicted a while ago for cookies – they get themselves into legal tangles by assuming “If I need consent for X, might as well get it for Y”. We’ve been focusing more […]

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Hints at ICO approach to AI

It’s interesting to see the (UK) ICO’s response to the (EU) consultation on an AI Act​​​​​​. The EU proposal won’t directly affect us, post-Brexit, but it seems reasonable to assume that where the ICO “supports the proposal”, we’ll see pretty similar policies here. Three of those seem directly relevant to education: That remote biometric identification […]

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ICO proposals on personal data exports

The ICO’s proposals for international transfers seem closer to the actual findings of the Schrems II case than the EDPB’s effective demand that processing of non-pseudonymised data be kept within Europe. However, as a risk-based scheme, it will require more work from both exporters and importers to demonstrate that transferring doesn’t create significantly greater risk […]

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Draft Online Safety Bill

The Government’s Online Safety Bill proposes to impose duties on “user-to-user services” to deal with harmful (including both lawful and unlawful) content and to protect free speech while doing so. Unlike most operators of on-line discussion platforms, educational institutions already have legal duties in both areas: through legislation on safeguarding, preventing radicalisation, and free speech. […]

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Respectful systems: Not just for Children

The ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code (more familiarly the “Children’s Code”) may have been written before lockdown, but it could provide useful guidance to everyone designing or implementing systems for the post-COVID world. We’re all trying to work out what a “hybrid” world should look like, whether in schools, colleges, universities, workplaces or social spaces. […]

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Assessment – many ways to do it

  Jisc’s 2020 Future of Assessment report identifies five desirable features that assessors should design their assessments to deliver: authentic, accessible, appropriately automated, continuous and secure. Those can sometimes seem to conflict, for example if you decide that “secure” assessment requires the student to be online through their exam, then you have an “accessibility” problem for […]