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 ‘privacy’ because it’s a complex and sensitive subject and as a young academic at the start of my career, I didn’t want to find myself being criticised for something that I am still getting to grips with.
I decided that I would talk about something more concrete, my #PrivacyUG class. It meant that I could talk about something more tangible than theorising. I was quite nervous, because I knew that there would be thousands of people viewing the video, but it’s all good practice I suppose. Some of the comments are encouraging and also provide some more insight into tracking technologies which I hadn’t thought about, since I am not a software engineer in any way. In fact, we laughed at the fact that my coding language of choice was HTML and CSS, a far cry from programming languages such as python.