I was asked whether I would br happy to do a video for Computerphile on Internet privacy. Following the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica debacle and with the new General Data Protection Regulation coming into force in May 2018, the subscribers wanted something on this topic. When I was approached I was reluctant to talk directly about…
Category: Privacy
Risk Emotions in Uncertain Times
I have been thinking about Maha’s emotive post [1] for a couple of days now. For my PhD I have been doing a lot of reading recently around risk (as a requisite of trust) and how it often manifests irrationally. As someone who is quintessentially white privilege, it should be easy for me to say…
OER17 some thoughts
I wrote a heck of a lot of thoughts into my notepad of what I wanted to write about, but I think the read time could amount to ~10 hours… So here’s a snapshot of thoughts right now. They aren’t complete by any stretch, but I have to get something down now before a new…
Free Health Apps
* Full Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I am a healthy sceptic/critic of privacy policies. My PhD research focuses on notions of informed consent and data trade-offs. I recently read this post by Jen that reviews the Gut Health Storylines app. A mobile application by Self Care Catalysts (SCC) for people living with…
Discourses around privacy
In a seminar today we were asked where we would put ourselves on a scale from 0-10 where private is 0 and open is 10. Is this even the right scale to be talking about and through? I wonder whether we are using appropriate language to critically talk about what we mean by privacy in the post-digital age… Privacy…
Digital Division, a commentary on the rich and poor
I’ve recently read an article by the Daily Dot entitled “Privacy is creating a new digital divide between the rich and poor” and it feels problematic. It explores how only the educated and wealthy can afford to be private citizens in the digital. What does it mean to be wealthy in the post-digital age? What…
laptop:config
Until now, I have been parading around with my (comparatively heavy) 5-year-old Macbook Pro that is eccentrically covered in pop-culture stickers and has the webcam taped over. The very explicit act of covering my webcam is quite often a talking point and although I am not the only to do it amongst my colleagues, there…
Self-surveillance and memory
I often talk about the idea of surveillance and ‘dragnets’ and often I am talking about other people surveilling us. What I have been thinking about recently is our ability to self-surveil and interpret. Something that the digital affords is memory: transactions and files are stored in a binary computer readable format that can be…
Engineered Digital Habits
“to share anything they want with anyone they want in a natural way” – Mark Zuckerberg, 2016 – On the back of Facebook’s annual conference, it was this line that has stuck out for me. The belief that our online networks and connections are considered as natural as speaking face-to-face. These semantics do not come…
A note on learners’ digital footprints
So yesterday I was (unsurprisingly) talking about learners’ data, not just their learning data but all their data that has been harvested over years, before they enter a university classroom. Forget digital migrants and natives, just because students are now growing up with digital technologies (I did) it doesn’t mean that they have any more…