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.
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.
The latest text in the long-running saga of the draft ePrivacy Regulation contains further reassuring indicators for incident response teams that want to share data to help others.
In a world where data storage is almost unlimited and algorithms promise to interrogate data to answer any question, it's tempting for security teams to simply follow a "log everything, for ever" approach. At this week's CSIRT Task Force in Malaga, Xavier Mertens suggested that traditional approaches are still preferable.
[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.
Talking to new audiences, who may not share your preconceptions, is a great way to learn new things. So I was delighted to be invited to Dublin to talk about learning analytics as part of their DALTAí project (an English backronym creating the Irish for student: bilingualism creates opportunities!). The audience - and my fellow panellists - came from a particularly wide range: students, tutors, ethics, regulatory, administrative, etc. all around one table.
The European Data Protection Supervisor has just published an interesting paper on the research provisions in the GDPR. The whole thing is worth reading, but some things particularly caught my eye:
[UPDATE: my slides are now available]
This week I've been presenting at an event on Artificial Intelligence in Education, organised by the Finnish Government in their current role as EU Presidency. Specifically I was asked to look at where we might find building blocks for the ethical use of AI in education.
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to an audience of university accommodation managers (thanks to Kinetic for the invitation), where I suggested that we should view Data Protection as an opportunity, rather than a challenge.
Last week I was invited to be a member of a panel at the UN Internet Governance Forum on how law can help security and incident response and, in particular, information sharing. It seems there are still concerns in some places that privacy law is getting in the way of these essential functions.