Reflecting on the scope chosen by Blackboard for our working group – “Ethical use of AI in Education” – it’s worth considering what, if anything, makes education different as a venue for artificial intelligence. Education is, I think, different from commercial businesses because our measure of success should be what pupils/students achieve. Educational institutions should […]
Category: Articles
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
Ethical use of AI in HE
Last week I was invited to a fascinating discussion on ethical use of artificial intelligence in higher education, hosted by Blackboard. Obviously that’s a huge topic, so I’ve been trying to come up with a way to divide it into smaller ones without too many overlaps. So far, it seems a division into three may […]
Explaining AI algorithms
One of the concerns commonly raised for Artificial Intelligence is that it may not be clear how a system reached its conclusion from the input data. The same could well be said of human decision makers: AI at least lets us choose an approach based on the kind of explainability we want. Discussions at last […]
Article 29 WP draft on Transparency
The Article 29 Working Party has published its draft guidelines on transparency. For those of us who have already been working on GDPR privacy notices, there don’t seem to be any surprises: this is largely a compilation of the relevant sections of the Regulation and other guidance. In particular, it seems to have been strongly […]
Concern has sometimes been expressed whether the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) requirement to notify individuals of all processing of their personal data would cause difficulties for security and incident response teams. These activities involve a lot of processing of IP addresses, which the GDPR and case law seem to indicate will normally count as […]
Article 29 WP draft on Consent
The Article 29 Working Party of European Data Protection Supervisors has published draft guidance on consent under the General Data Protection Regulation. Since the Working Party has already published extensive guidance on the existing Data Protection Directive rules on consent, this new paper concentrates on what has changed under the GDPR. The first message is […]
[Update: a Government amendment to Clause 6 of the Bill appears to confirm that this is their intended interpretation :)] The new Data Protection Bill seems to bring clarity to the question of which legal bases will be available to educational institutions under the General Data Protection Regulation: Clause 6(1) of the Bill states that […]
The Article 29 Working Party’s draft guidance on Breach Notification under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides welcome recognition of the need to do incident response and mitigation in parallel with any breach notification rather than, as I’ve been warning since 2012, giving priority to notification. Now the Working Party is explicit that “immediately […]
GDPR – Privacy Notices
Although privacy notices are an important aspect of the General Data Protection Regulation, it seems unlikely that we will have final guidance from regulators for several months. Since we need to start rolling out GDPR-friendly privacy notices for Jisc services sooner than that, we’re using what information we have – the GDPR itself, the Information […]
GDPR: Data Protection Impact Assessments
The Article 29 Working Party of European data protection supervisors has published the final version of its Guidelines on Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs). These build on the long-standing concept of Privacy Impact Assessments, being similar to normal risk assessments but looking at risks to the individuals whose data are being processed, rather than to […]