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.
News and Research articles on United States
This paper examines the contradictory legal geographies that domestic courts currently negotiate when dealing with online and transnational child luring.
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 …
The internet is a forum for geopolitical struggle as states wield power beyond their terrestrial territorial borders through the extraterritorial geographies of data flows. This exertion of power across multiple jurisdictions, and via the infrastructure of transnational technology companies, creates new challenges for traditional forms of regulatory governance and the protection of human rights.
This paper examines data and privacy governance by four China-based mobile applications and their international versions - including the role of the state. It also highlights the role of platforms in gatekeeping mobile app privacy standards.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Recital 23 brought an obligation to all companies that receive, control or process personal data of European Union (EU) residents to comply with the minimal safeguards stated in European legislation.
Can platforms delete whatever content they want? Not everywhere, say the authors of this paper, which shows why certain social networks ‘must carry’ some content – and how users in some jurisdictions can force the companies to allow them into their communicative space.
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 shows how platforms are transient in the policies, procedures, and affordances and details the implications for politics.
Focusing on whether data-intensive technologies used in political campaigning are accurate and effective misses the point about their larger role in politics. This piece briefly addresses the popular question of “Does it work?” and suggests a series of questions and provocations that aim to more holistically capture the extent of tech-led disruption in a time of creeping voter surveillance.
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.
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.
Information and communication technologies allow tax administrations to gather and process large amounts of data in order to individuate tax evaders. However, how to strike a balance between privacy rights and tax compliance?
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 …
Why did China’s Alibaba platform reform its enforcement practices in line with demands from the US government and US companies?
What are the informal arrangements governing online content on platforms in Europe, and what are the factors that make them more or less successful?
Net neutrality consultations that tap into networked publics rest on a thin version of participation that maintains existing inequality.