Emeritus Professor of Digital Economy, University of Nottingham
I was delighted and privileged to be invited to join the Furman committee in 2018
(and many thanks to my proposer). The mission -
to make recommendations on changes to
competition and pro-competition policy to help unlock the opportunities of the digital
economy. So we did that and published as the Unlocking Digital Competition report.
However, we now have concerns that the government is watering down the panel recommendations in the upcoming DMCC bill…
Update: I’ve now wrangled the MacOS client to work, but it does not like having two tunnels open at once (although you can bring up multiple tunnels via “Systems Preference > Network”), and you have to set ip forwarding by hand.
Read More from November 13, 2020Linked here our full comments on the European Data Protection Board’s
Guidelines 07/2020 on the concepts of controller and processor in the GDPR
Submitted by Prof. Derek McAuley, Prof. Lilian Edwards, Dr. Lachlan Urquhart and Dr. Jiahong Chen of
Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute.
27 October 2020
Summary: Overall, the EDPB’s adoption of the Guidelines provides additional clarity and certainty for data
controllers and processors to comply with the GDPR. We provide three recommendations as to how the Guidelines can be improved in the final
version:
Linked here our full comments on the European Data Protection Board’s
Guidelines 4/2019 on Article 25 Data Protection by Design and by Default
Submitted by Prof. Derek McAuley, Dr. Ansgar Koene and Dr. Jiahong Chen of
Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, University of Nottingham
16 January 2020
Summary: Overall, the EDPB’s adoption of the Guidelines represents a helpful step forward in promoting
ethical and privacy-friend design and default approaches, and the current version has largely
covered right issues with an appropriate level of details and useful examples. To sum up the specific
comments outlined above, we provide three recommendations as to how the Guidelines can be
improved in the final version:
At Gikii 2018, strapline - The Truth is Meowt There - ,
Lilian Edwards and
I did a double act on the issue of the GDPR household exemption for IoT and how it could warp your mind.
Together with colleagues Jiahong Chen and Lachlan Urquhart,
we have now written it up and here’s the preprint.
Abstract: The growing industrial and research interest in protecting privacy and fighting cyberattacks
for smart homes has sparked various innovations in security- and privacy-enhancing technologies (S/PETs)
powered by edge computing. The complex technical set-up has however raised a whole series of legal
issues surrounding the regulation of smart home with data protection law. To determine how
responsibility and accountability should be fairly assumed by stakeholders, there is a pressing
need to first clarify the roles of these parties within the existing data protection data protection
legal framework. This article focuses on two legal concepts under the GDPR as the mechanisms to
(dis)assign responsibilities to various categories of entities in a domestic IoT context: joint
controllership and the household exemption. A close examination of the relevant provisions and
case-law shows a widening notion of joint controllership and a narrowing scope for the household exemption.
While this interpretative approach may prevent evasion of accountability in specific cases, it may lead
to the unintended consequence of imposing disproportionate compliance burdens on developers, contributors,
and users of smart home safety technologies. By discouraging users to adopt S/PETs, data protection law may
likely lead to a lower level of privacy and security protection. The differential responsibilities among joint
controllers as envisaged in case-law may reconcile the tensions to some degree, but certain limitations remain.
The regulatory dilemma in this regard highlights some underlying assumptions of data protection law that are
no longer valid with regard to a smart home, and thus calls for further conceptual and empirical studies on
fair reassignment of responsibility and accountability in a domestic IoT setting.
In which Richard Mortier and I compare some proposed plans for DoH to the highly secretive, and utlimately subversive to the Federation, Section 31. Trust me, it makes sense at Gikii.
Read More from September 9, 2019This is now my primary blog and personal website. Having had my posts concerning trackers on blogger rightly criticized as embedding trackers, I have migrated to GitHub. Of course the irony is that GitHub Ts&Cs and Privacy Policy now apply…
Response to Call for Evidence for House of Lords Select Committee on Communications inquiry into “The Internet: To Regulate or Not To Regulate?”
Written evidence submitted by Prof. Derek McAuley, Dr. Ansgar Koene, Dr. Lachlan Urquhart of the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, University of Nottingham.
May 11th 2018.
Summary: it is already regulated - could someone please enforce existing regulation.
Response from the UnBias/ReEntrust team to the Partliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into Impact of social media and screen-use on young people’s health.
Read More from April 1, 2018
Databox results from many years of research into personal data and their ecosystems. This short note lays out the primary motivations and the thinking behind Databox without delving into the technical detail. As background, I recommend watching the “What is Databox” video on YouTube to obtain a high-level view of the Databox approach. Fundamentally, the forces that motivate Databox arise from the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the advent of the Internet of Things, and the need to balance consumer concerns such as privacy and accountability with commercial desire to exploit new opportunities provided by the widespread generation, collection and analysis of data.“We’re explicitly avoiding the term ‘fake news,’ because we think it is too vague,” said Paul Haahr, one of Google’s senior engineers who is involved with search quality. “Demonstrably inaccurate information, however, we want to target.”Read More from March 21, 2017
A recent survey (Sep 2015) for IPSWITCH was broadly picked up by the tech press and highlighted the concerns of IT professionals with the looming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); 69% say their business will need to invest in new technologies or services to help prepare the business for the impact of GDPR including:
Show me the future of: the built environment and open dataSo what's it all about? I've been on a journey...
| Wife's blog - children's author |  |
| My blog, ramblings of an academic |  |
The recently published government report entitled "Seizing the data opportunity" lays out a wide ranging programme of activities to take on the challenge of both turning UK companies into data driven organizations and leaders in new data driven services. |
| What do they know about you? Source: MyDex CIC |
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| @gikii and #gikii2013 on twitter |
An article "Small businesses could save reputation of digital services..." over on The Conversation.
Over the last year I've been involved in many of the events organised by the Technology Strategy Board to shape the creation of the Connect Digital Economy Catapult (CDEC) and have been keen to see how we can pass the results coming out of the Research Council's Digital Economy programme downstream into the hands of innovators. Hence I've been delighted to be offered the role of Chief Innovation Officer (in residence) at CDEC to help shape it during the start up phase. This entails a couple of day in London each week so calendar challenges, but already having fun. Details as it happens...
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy we hear of one Zarniwoop who is "...in his office, but on an intergalactic cruise".
Re: a previous post - life just got slightly better with an upgrade to BT Infinity - BW now 80Mbps rather than the 256kbps cap we were on again! iPlayer here we come..
ArtMaps is a collaboration with
Tate investigating how people relate Art to location both through an online web experience as well as through mobile applications. Initially looking at the "easy" problem of crowdsourcing location, this rapidly led to 
So a very interesting talk from Simon Hampton of Google; followed by good discussions and a fine dinner at St. Johns to boot - well done the Connections team.
Like the approach of Raspberry Pi foundation - auctioning off their first 10 boards on ebay. Board 10 is leading the race with £2050 bid so far, not bad for a £25 retail ARM box and 4 days to go :-)
So; this is the sorry sight that greeted me as I deployed the tools for some light hedge trimming this morning. For those unversed in garden machinery lore and wizardry, what you see here is the result of a rodent nibbling on the carburettor primer pump of a chainsaw. Since integrity of this small plastic component is vital for it's correct operation - Mr Rat has quite effectively, and probably most efficiently, sabotaged my weekend's "hedge trimming"; however, he's not that smart as we can narrow down the suspects - this guy is clearly into solvent abuse."A lot of people are sort of driving this notion of fear around security" Kundra said. "And the reason I think that's been amplified, frankly, is because it preserves the status quo."
Talking to the folks from The Portal recently and starting to appreciate the levels of automation and small number of folks who are actually needed to manage the automation in these data centres, the issues of "who has the time?" and "wouldn't even know where to look" provided a lively topic of discussion; however, still think I'd like a smattering of "encryption at rest". Belt and braces don't you know.
THE WORKING PARTY ON THE PROTECTION OF INDIVIDUALS WITH REGARD TO THE PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATAstarts with an introduction to location based services... Read More from July 26, 2011
RIP Google Health and Powermeter (see here); and MSFT Hohm at the same time. In the immortal words of Half Man Half Biscuit "A million housewives every day pick up a tin of beans and say, 'what an amazing example of synchronisation'".From: Google PowerMeter <powermeter-noreply@google.com>
Date: 24 June 2011 22:20:24 GMT+01:00
To: me@email
Subject: Update on Google PowerMeter
Reply-To: powermeter-noreply@google.com
Dear PowerMeter User,
We first launched Google PowerMeter as a Google.org project to raise awareness about the importance of giving people access to their energy information. Since our launch, there's been more attention brought to this issue, and we're excited that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of access to energy data. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would have liked, so we have decided to retire PowerMeter.
You will continue to have access to the product until September 16, 2011, after which time you will no longer be able to access your PowerMeter account. We know that having access to your energy information has helped you save energy and money. There are many options available for you from our device and utility partners. Please visit this page to learn more: http://www.google.com/support/powermeter/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1342532
We also understand that having your historical energy data is important to you. We've made it easy for you to download your data. To export your PowerMeter data to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file, log in to your account and go to "Account Settings." More information can be found here:http://www.google.com/support/powermeter/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164264
We appreciate your understanding and hope that you've enjoyed using Google PowerMeter. If you have questions about this announcement, please visit our FAQ pages at http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/faqs.html
Thank you,
Google PowerMeter team
© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You've received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your Google PowerMeter account.
Crosby said the threat it [sic] to everything under the umbrella of the public web. “[U]nless we solve some of these problems,” he said, “the whole cloud thing is just a big waste of time for everybody."Read More from June 22, 2011
Analyzing large data sets—so called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.So say McKinsey...
Read More
from May 4, 2011
Most psychiatrists have engaged in "patient-targeted Googling", say the authors, and find personal information ranging from criminal records, details of substance use, sexual activity, finances and suicide plans.
"Having been spied on for decades, first by the Nazis and then by the Stasi, the notorious communist secret police, Germans take their privacy seriously, our correspondent says."more here...
I was giving a talk recently at a BIS and was in need of an example showing the shift from capital to operational costs for businesses in the era of cloud computing. Who better than Animoto to use as an example - especially once I found this fine graphic showing the 3 day growth curve."It is well-known that successfully researching, designing and building new mobile, ad hoc, mesh and opportunistic networking systems and algorithms requires access to large-scale data on human mobility, encounter, and social network patterns. ..."
"The definition [of ‘processing’] in the Act is a compendious definition and it is difficult to envisage any action involving data which does not amount to processing within this definition"I was amused reading this lecture this week as it co-incided with finding an example not covered by the Act - from the ICO we find a press releasefrom 2007!
"However, the Regulations only apply to messages sent over a public electronic communications network and we have concluded that Bluetooth messages are not in fact sent using such a network."Nor a lot of research networks of the last number of years! (e.g. Haggle...)
.....
The "Internet of Things (IoT)" disrupts with the today's Internet limitations of human-entered data: technologies like RFID, short-range wireless communications, real-time localization, and sensor networks empower computers to perceive the world for themselves. Standardized infrastructures capable of managing, sharing and processing this captured data will be necessary in order to bring the Internet of Things into commercial use. This interlinking of physical world and cyberspace foreshadows an exciting endeavor that is highly relevant to researchers, corporations, and individuals.Read More from November 4, 2009
Copy of an 
Maurizio Pilu 
