News and Research articles on United Kingdom

The UK welfare system relies on gender stereotyping and, increasingly, on surveillance: risking a vicious cycle of categorisation and control

Internet companies are conduits through which states can exercise their authority beyond their borders. As Chinese companies such as Huawei become more commercially dominant, they threaten the geopolitical power of the US.

Although the GDPR paves the way for a coordinated EU-wide legal action against data protection infringements, only a reform of private international law rules can enhance the opportunities of data subjects to enforce their rights.

The percentages and figures used in the impact assessment accompanying the European Commission’s e-evidence package strongly influence the analysis of the problem and limit the assessment of the problem of cross-border access to e-evidence to technical and efficiency considerations.

This paper is part of Geopolitics, jurisdiction and surveillance, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Monique Mann and Angela Daly. Introduction Since the Snowden revelations in 2013 (see e.g., Lyon, 2014; Lyon, 2015) an ongoing policy issue has been the legitimate scope of surveillance, and the extent to which individuals and groups can assert their fundamental rights, including privacy. There has been a renewed focus on policies regarding access to encrypted communications, which are part of a longer history of the ‘cryptowars’ of the 1990s (see e.g., Koops, 1999). We examine these provisions in the Anglophone ‘Five Eyes’ (FVEY) The FVEY partnership is a comprehensive …

Facing fragmentation of digital space in the Snowden aftermath, this article considers regulatory models available to avoid the balkanisation of the internet.

Targeted political advertising can potentially exclude voter segments from important political information, and undermine the democratic process

Management of the internet by the principle of the multistakeholder governance model has survived attempts of replacing it with inter-government management. What additional principles are useful to guide global internet governance and enhance ICANN’s legitimacy, seen in light of recent challenges? Are the disagreements over global internet governance also about diverging understandings of the goals in internet governance?

This paper examines how Google Search ranked 29 junk news domains between 2016 and 2019, finding that SEO — rather than paid advertising — is the most important strategy for generating discoverability via Google Search. Google has taken several steps to combat the spread of disinformation on Search, and these strategies have been largely successful at limiting the discoverability of junk news.

This paper discusses how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe, from the perspective of data protection law, freedom of expression, and political advertising rules.

Discussing three factors that characterise the activities of political campaigners, this article demonstrates variations in who is using data in campaigns, what the sources of campaign data are, and how data informs communication.

Ad archives are a novel tool in online advertising governance. They promise significant benefits, but only if their operators address key criticisms.

This paper is part of Transnational materialities, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by José van Dijck and Bernhard Rieder. Introduction Questions about how data is generated, collected and used have taken hold of public imagination in recent years, not least in relation to government. While the collection of data about populations has always been central to practices of governance, the digital era has placed increased emphasis on the politics of data in state-citizen relations and contemporary power dynamics. In part a continuation of long-standing processes of bureaucratisation, the turn to data-centric practices in government across Western democracies emerges out of …

What are the informal arrangements governing online content on platforms in Europe, and what are the factors that make them more or less successful?

How do we construct and deliver data privacy rights? We discuss two recent Australian initiatives on regulation of digital platforms and a new consumer data right.

Since being first developed through the case law of the European Court of Justice, the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) has rapidly diffused beyond its European origins: in Latin America for instance. This paper documents the wide spectrum of interpretations the RTBF has had across countries and data protection authorities.

This paper analyses the selection, dissemination, and framing of media messages in day-to-day politics topic communities on Twitter

This paper examines three historical imaginaries associated with encryption, considering how they are intertwined in contemporary policy debates.

With widespread smart contract implementation on the horizon, there is much conversation about how to regulate this new technology. Noting the failure of contract law to address the inequities of standardised contracts in the digital environment can help prevent them from being codified further into smart contracts.