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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 stream the event, and Bluetooth and other transmissions from the many laptops and devices we were all carrying.
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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 of the city.
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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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[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 of that benefit back to us, for example in the form of services we don't have to pay money for.
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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 the only difference: connected hardware devices tend to be much more diverse than PCs, and they are expected to have much longer lifetimes.
Blog Article
[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]
Blog Document
Earlier this week I did a presentation to a group from Dutch Universities on the ethics work that Jisc has done alongside its studies, pilots and services on the use of data.
Blog Document
With the GDPR having now been in force for more than six months, my talk at this week's EUNIS workshop looked at some of the less familiar corners of the GDPR map. In particular, since EUNIS provided an international audience, I was looking for opportunities to find common, or at least compatible, approaches across the international endeavours of education and research.
Topics covered: What is a University? Network and Information Security; Research; Learning Analytics; Intelligent Campus; and Wellbeing.
