I'm Chief Regulatory Advisor at Jisc, responsible for keeping an eye out for places where our ideas, services and products might raise regulatory issues. My aim is to fix either the product or service, or the regulation, before there's a painful bump!
Alan Shark’s SOCITM ShareNational keynote looked at why regulation is not sufficient to deal with emerging technologies, and the complementary role that needs to be played by ethics. Although privacy is not the only threat posed by such technologies, it does seem to be the one that has got people interested in the debate, whether over […]
Allison Gardner’s keynote to the SOCTIM ShareNational conference last week highlighted how using AI responsibly is at least as much about how decisions are made as about the technology itself. Questions of “transparency” often focus on whether the AI is explainable, but how decisions were made – even how a particular problem was identified and […]
Perhaps surprisingly – given that its title was “Digital ethics” – last week’s SOCITM panel session spent a lot of time exploring things that aren’t “digital”. Although the discussion focussed on local government, a lot of the ideas seemed relevant to education, too. Don’t be solutionist: technology might not be the right option. When identifying […]
Thinking through an idea that occurred to me during our SOCITM ShareNational panel on ethical use of data and technology. What happens if we explicitly think about “our spaces, which people use”, rather than “people that use our spaces”? That may seem like a semantic quibble, but I think it leads in three interesting directions: […]
When I was invited to join a panel at the SOCITM ShareNational event for local government I presumed my role was to provide a different, external, perspective on “Ethical Use of Emerging Technologies and Data”. So I offered to contribute a five-minute “sparkler” introduction: a bit of illumination, some striking of ideas, maybe a smile. […]
A panel on Algorithms at the UK IGF asked whether the summer of 2020 was a catastrophe – “mutant algorithm” having entered political discourse – or an opportunity to work with a population that is now much more aware of the personal significance of the debate? “Transparency” is often cited as a remedy, but we […]
I’m pleased to announce the publication of our Intelligent Campus Data Protection Impact Assessment Toolkit. Intelligent Campuses use existing data and new sensors to deliver better places to study, work, live and socialise. But there’s a risk with any use of data or sensors that even the best-intentioned ideas will be misused or misunderstood: as […]
A panel on “Building Trust in a Digital Identity” at the UK IGF may have raised more questions than answers, but at least highlighted why doing so is taking so long. Since terminology can be confusing, what was being discussed was how to prove facts about your real-world self to an online service: for example […]
Lilian Edwards gave a fascinating keynote at the UK IGF this morning, on Protecting Digital Rights During a Pandemic. Though privacy is the most often discussed right in the context of pandemic response, rights of free speech and free assembly also need to be borne in mind. Although the impact of national schemes (contact tracing […]
Colleagues set me the challenge of saying something about my work in one minute. So here (on YouTube) is a “peacast” – my wife says it’s too small to be a “podcast” – on Brexit and GDPR: Comments very welcome on the format and, if you like it, suggestions for any other topics I could […]