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Publications

Maintaining trust in University data handling

WONKHE has published my article on the need to be careful in introducing, and withdrawing, with any post-virus data processing (the absolute sub-head isn’t mine!) Maintaining trust in university data handling

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Presentations

EUNIS 2020 Keynote: Ethics and the Intelligent Campus

I’ll be delivering the opening keynote, “See No… Hear No… Track No…: Ethics and the Intelligent Campus“, at the EUNIS 2020 (online) conference on Wednesday June 10th at 0815 (UK-time). Registration for the conference is free, and there are lots of other interesting talks on the programme.

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Articles

Student-led smart cities

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 […]

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Presentations

Thinking about data?

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. […]

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Closed Consultations

Consultation: Assessing the impact of (re-)using campus data

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 […]

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Articles

Data, Flows and Benefits

[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 […]

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Articles

The Big Bad Smart Fridge

Leonie Tanczer’s FIRST 2019 keynote (recording now available on YouTube) looked at more than a decade of European discussions of whether/how to regulate the Internet of Things (no, I didn’t realise, either) and how we might do better in future. This is particularly relevant to an incident response conference as – as Mirai and other […]

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Articles

Things that Go Bump in the Night

Apparently Miranda Mowbray had been wanting to do a talk on “Things that Go Bump in the Night” for some time, and it made an excellent closing keynote for the 2019 FIRST conference in Edinburgh (recording now available on YouTube). Although “things” may increasingly need an Internet connection to operate, there are significant differences between […]

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Articles

Incident Response for Connected Hardware

An interesting talk from Rockwell at this year’s FIRST conference looked at how to organise incident response in environments containing network-connected hardware devices. Though Rockwell’s focus is on industrial machinery, the same ideas should apply to smart buildings and other places where a security incident can cause physical, not just digital, harm. This is not […]

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Publications

Intelligent Campus: Risks, Benefits and Ethics

[Re-purposing an unused introduction to my full paper – “See no… Hear no… Track no..: Ethics and the Intelligent Campus” – that was published in the Journal of Information Rights, Policy and Practice this week] The Intelligent Campus is a microcosm of the Smart City. Smart cities, according to Finch and Tene, may be “more […]