Abstract: Most users of the Internet today cannot remember an online experience without significant amounts of tracking. In this lecture, I will outline both where we have come from --- how even when the law has arguably kept up, enforcement has been limited and confused --- as well as where we are going. This includes consideration of privacy enhancing technologies used both to prevent and, counter-intuitively, to facilitate tracking. Detailed profiling of individuals for the purposes of personalisation and advertising seems unlikely to go away, but instead to become more computationally complex, as further entwined in platform business models. We will consider the potential technological, legal, and policy responses to these trends, and think through the Internet(s) we might want in the years to come.
Bio: Dr Michael Veale is Associate Professor in digital rights and regulation at University College London's Faculty of Laws. His research focusses on how to understand and address challenges of power and justice that digital technologies and their users create and exacerbate, in areas such as privacy-enhancing technologies and machine learning. He tweets at @mikarv. Longer bio at https://michae.lv/bios/
Maria Dimou / 19 Participants