A fascinating Digifest talk by Westminster City Council suggested that students may have a key role in ensuring that smart city and intelligent campus projects deliver real benefits. Westminster have a partnership with two of their local universities – KCL and UCL – that gives Masters students access to the council’s extensive datasets about use […]
The question mark in the title of my Digifest talk is the key point, because I wonder whether data is the wrong place to start. In our current digital landscape, we’re all too used to hearing ourselves described as “silkworms”, donating “new oil” to “surveillance capitalists”; even the term “data subject” has a dehumanising feel. […]
Our university and college buildings already contain a surprising number of sensors that could collect information about those who occupy them. At a recent event I spotted at least half a dozen different systems in a normal lecture room, including motion detectors, swipe card readers, wireless access points, the camera and microphone being used to […]
The latest text in the long-running saga of the draft ePrivacy Regulation contains further reassuring indicators for incident response teams that want to share data to help others. Article 6(1)(b) allows network providers to process electronic communications data (a term that includes both metadata and content) where this is necessary “necessary to maintain or restore […]
Having acted as programme chair for the FIRST Security and Incident response conference last year, I also got to co-edit the special conference issue of the ACM journal Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP). FIRST sponsored the journal, so our issue is open access, available for anyone to read. Topics covered: Using power consumption to […]
In a world where data storage is almost unlimited and algorithms promise to interrogate data to answer any question, it’s tempting for security teams to simply follow a “log everything, for ever” approach. At this week’s CSIRT Task Force in Malaga, Xavier Mertens suggested that traditional approaches are still preferable. With the speed of modern […]
[A second post arising out of excellent discussions at the DALTAí project seminar in Dublin this week] We’re all familiar, perhaps too familiar, with how data flows typically work online. We give commercial companies access to data about ourselves; they extract some benefit from it, for example by selling profiled advertising space; they share some […]
Talking to new audiences, who may not share your preconceptions, is a great way to learn new things. So I was delighted to be invited to Dublin to talk about learning analytics as part of their DALTAí project (an English backronym creating the Irish for student: bilingualism creates opportunities!). The audience – and my fellow […]
The European Data Protection Supervisor has just published an interesting paper on the research provisions in the GDPR. The whole thing is worth reading, but some things particularly caught my eye: Stresses (again) that research-consent is not the same as GDPR-consent, though the former may still be an “appropriate safeguard” when using a legal basis […]
Jisc responded to the Information Commissioner’s consultation on draft guidance on explaining AI. The final guidance was published in May 2020. We welcome the ICO/Turing Institute’s draft guidance on Explaining AI Decisions, and believe that it could be useful well beyond the narrow question of when and how decisions need to be explained. However, as […]