Whether you refer to your technology as “data-driven”, “machine learning” or “artificial intelligence”, questions about “algorithmic transparency” are likely to come up. The finest example is perhaps the ICO’s heroic analysis of different statistical techniques. But it seems to me that there’s a more fruitful aspect of transparency earlier in the adoption process: why was […]
Month: February 2023
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Data Protection Benefits with ORCID
A few weeks ago I presented on “ORCID and GDPR” at a UK Consortium event. I hope this was reassuring: I’ve always been very impressed with ORCID’s approach to Data Protection (in the European sense of “managed processing”, not the more limited one of “security”), but take it from the German Consortium’s lawyers, back in […]
The Home Office consultation on Computer Misuse Act (CMA) reform raises the possibility of a new offence of “possessing or using illegally obtained data”. This is presumably in response to the growing complexity of cyber-crime supply chains. It’s good to see immediate recognition that this will need “appropriate safeguards”. This post looks at why someone […]
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Law of the (AI) Horse?
When the Internet first came to legislators’ notice, there was a tendency to propose all-encompassing “laws of internet” for this apparently new domain. A celebrated paper by Frank Easterbrook argued that (my summary) there wasn’t a separate body of new harms to address and that existing laws might well prove sufficiently flexible to deal with […]
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Ransomware: Economics for Defenders
The recent rash of ransomware incidents has been linked to the availability of crypto-currencies – as a way that victims can pay ransoms to anonymous attackers – so Trend Micro reviewed the economic models for ransomware and, among many other aspects, whether changes in the crypto-currency world might have knock-on effects. Their conclusions are mixed: […]