Terminology matters. OK, you’d expect me to say that, as a sometime mathematician, engineer and lawyer. But the importance to all of us is highlighted by a confusing tangle of terminology that has grown out of Ann Cavoukian’s original idea of “Privacy by Design”. That phrase was introduced in 1995 – just too late to […]
Last year, I was invited to give a talk “on GDPR” to NISO, an organisation that develops standards for managing digital information. While most of my thinking and writing has looked at applying data protection law to existing systems, this seemed like a good opportunity to think about how you might use it at an […]
A few years ago I wrote a post on how the GDPR copes with situations when there was a conflict between the obligation to prevent, detect and investigate incidents and the obligation to inform all those whose personal data you process. Do you, for example, need to inform someone who is attacking your systems that […]
Over the past decade or more, we’ve developed federated access management as a technical, policy and legal framework to exchange up-to-date information to help current staff and students access the resources they need. Authentication, status and membership information all need to be fresh to be useful and frequent use makes it worth organisations entering into […]
A colleague spotted an article suggesting, among other things, that Virtual Reality could provide a safe space for students to practice their soft skills. This can, of course, be done by classroom roleplay but the possibility of making mistakes that fellow students will remember could well increase stress. This certainly chimes with feedback I received […]
Recently I was in a video-conference where Apple’s “smart” assistant kept popping up on the presenter’s shared screen. Another delegate realised this happened whenever the word “theory” was spoken. It’s close… These events – which I refer to as “false-wakes” – are privacy risk: maybe small, but that depends very much on the nature of […]
We can probably agree that “Ethical Artificial Intelligence” is a desirable goal. But getting there can involve daunting leaps over unfamiliar terrain. What do principles like “beneficence” and “non-maleficence” mean in practice? Indeed, what is, and is not, AI? Working with the British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association (BILETA), Jisc’s National Centre for […]
[Update (Nov’21): I’ve discovered that Patrick Breyer MEP has published a “parallel text” of the three current proposals (Commission, Parliament and Council). Not exactly easy reading, but it makes it much easier to see where they are similar, and where there remain significant differences] [Original (Feb’21) post…] After four years, and nearly three years after […]
Something made me uneasy when a colleague recently referred to “AI bias”. I think that’s because it doesn’t mention the actual source of such bias: humans! AI may expand and expose that bias, but it can’t do that unless we give it the seed. That’s rarely deliberate: we might treat it as a result of […]
The Information Commissioner’s response to proposals for data protection reform has another take on my idea of the law helping us to find sweet spots: those points shouldn’t be seen as “trade-offs”, but as mutually beneficial. As the ICO puts it: The economic and societal benefits of this digital growth are only possible through earning […]