Unlock door. Open door. Go outside.

22 May 2023
Musings
A locked hiding place I spotted hidden in a forest. I wonder who has the key.

First, a quick admin note for my dear readers, all three of you. As may be obvious, I’m on a blogging hiatus. In addition to being physically and mentally flat, the little bit of energy I do have has been appropriated by the Jobcentre. (For those outside the UK, that’s the place I have to visit weekly to prove that I’m legitimately looking for work in order to receive just enough unemployment benefits to eat and do nothing else.)

So, yes, I have nothing to say and no energy to say it with. So don’t expect my usual erudite drivel for a while.

But. That being said.

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Greatest hits, b-sides, and unfinished demo tracks: or, all my blogging on the Online Safety Bill

17 April 2023
UK policy
A still frame from the film "The Post" showing an old printing press, loaded with type blocks which say "free to publish"

Ahead of the Online Safety Bill’s return to the Lords, Graham Smith has published a blog post aggregating his six years of blogging on the Bill’s provisions, its legal consequences, and its unintended outcomes.

As all good law and policy bloggers do, he also shares his thoughts on what these years of government’s defiant determination to make a bad law, out of bad policy, might mean for British statecraft in general, well beyond the Bill’s stated objectives.
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On Snowballs, Napoleons, and sharks

6 April 2023
Musings
BBC Radio 4 header image for the "A Very British Cult" podcast

The UK, which will take any scrap of comfort it can get right now, got a delicious treat yesterday out of nowhere: the team behind the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast, aka podcast crack, dropped a whole new series on a whole new topic. This time they have taken on a very unsavoury phenomenon which many of us, including myself, encountered in our formative years of running a business: and it is about time someone did.

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All data is health data.

13 March 2023
Privacy

Canny readers of my book will have figured out that the Postscript, formally titled “Privacy and health data”, was a coded message. We used those pages to talk about one thing, but we were actually talking about something else.
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Freaking out about TikTok on your work phone? You should look closer to home.

8 March 2023
Privacy
Map of European countries doing TikTok bans, from Politico

One of the biggest stories in tech policy, right now, is that governments all over the world are banning TikTok on government devices. There are concerns about Chinese state access to the information on those devices, and on wider systems, enabled by TikTok’s background software.

I won’t go into the full details here, but here is a well-balanced podcast on the issue, if you need to get up to speed; Politico even have a handy tracker for Europe.

As always, I Have Opinions on this, and for good reason.

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Can you help me teach privacy to those who need it most?

6 March 2023
Privacy
It's a book!

Since I first scribbled its rough outline, one of my goals for my book on foundational privacy has been for it to be adopted as a curricular teaching material. Hitting the printing presses in autumn/winter meant that we missed out on that opportunity. But it might just all work out in the end, because now is the time I want to encourage instructors to adopt the book in their classrooms, whether physical or virtual.

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The disinformation about the disinformation

6 February 2023
UK policy
Digital Planet logo

Digital Planet, the BBC World Service’s podcast about global technology and the internet, is a wonderful thing. It’s a weekly reminder that the world is a lot more than the global north, and a lot more than a handful of American companies. It’s also a stream of positive inspiration about the best of technology and what it can do: rays of sunshine in a world that seems awfully dark. Put it in your podcast app of choice.

Here’s an example, from a recent episode, about how the global perspective shared on the show can help you think about things much closer to home.

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You wise up.

3 February 2023
UK policy
A still frame from the film "The Post" showing an old printing press, loaded with type blocks which say "free to publish"

Much chatter amongst the chatterati, then, with yesterday’s addition to the saga that is the Online Safety Bill. Two prominent think tanks, Demos and Fair Vote – both of whom have invested years of good-faith work into the Bill process – took a principled stance to wise up and walk away.

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The sky is falling

1 February 2023
UK policy

Twenty years ago today was the second time, in a span of seventeen months, that I found myself standing in my flat in Washington DC, watching the telly, watching a picture of something falling from the sky, and as the thing fell to earth I reflexively reached out my hand to catch it, as if it was a thing the cat had knocked off the shelf. As with seventeen months prior, as the thing fell, I couldn’t catch it.
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2022’s best reads

10 January 2023
Musings
Boooooooks

Normally, by this time of year, I’ve been sent down several delightful rabbit holes created by good folks’ end-of-year reading lists. (Morten’s 2021 list alone cost me a fortune, for which serious thanks pal.) I’ve not seen those lists circulating so far this year, though, so I might as well get the ball rolling.

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