The missing pieces: teaching the legal side of web development
In June I attended the Web Teaching Day unconference, an annual gathering of educators bringing up the next generation of web professionals, at MMU in Manchester. Run by Richard Eskins …
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Tech policy is no place for hero fantasies
Don’t you love it when a policymaker resigns their post and you can hit publish on an old draft, which is very much my personal thoughts not in a professional …
A Glaswegian and a Norwegian walk into a trolley problem
Writing for the web is part of the job, but writing for something you can hold in your hands is special. This one definitely hits the target.
The first ever print issue of Smashing Magazine is shipping worldwide any day now. A deep dive into privacy and ethics, it includes a provocation piece Morten Rand-Hendriksen and I wrote on ethics washing.
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Just how bad is the ICO’s draft age appropriate design code?
Last month I worked with Coadec, the policy voice of Britain’s tech startups, to lead on the formulation of their response to the ICO’s draft Age Appropriate Design Code. I wrote this draft document as a roadmap for the work, although what follows here are very much my own personal thoughts, not Coadec’s.
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Won’t somebody think of the democracy?
I wrote for PublicTechnology about the Minister for Health exploiting technology fears to run roughshod over consultative democracy and the rule of law.
What I learned in the Mozilla Open Leaders initiative
This week wraps up my training in the Mozilla Open Leaders initiative. It’s been an amazing, very intense 14 weeks of learning, all in support of the team in the cross-project CMS privacy group.
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Castles and unicorns: my legacy to the WordPress community
One of my proudest professional achievements was selecting and wrangling speakers for three years of WordCamp Edinburgh. Over the past week, videos of 2017’s talks and most of 2018’s talks have been posted at wordpress.tv.
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The elephant in the room
I run a workshop for developers and digital leaders on how to build privacy into projects on the governance, project, and code levels. I was meant to return to PHP Yorkshire this weekend to run it as a half-day course. I’ll be staying home instead.
Interview: on being a privacy advocate in OSS
As part of my new consultancy role as a privacy advisor with Tap My Data, I was interviewed about how I came to become one. I babbled so much the …
Announcement: Mozilla Open Leaders
On #PrivacyDay #DataProtectionDay 2019, I am honoured to announce that I have been selected as a Mozilla Open Leader for my work in support of the cross-CMS privacy working group.
The era of sociopaths is over
What I’ll be working on in 2019
Better late than never – I blame the Scottish winter darkness – I would like to share what I will be working on this year, who I will be working with, and what I would like to focus on.
How to defend the open web: a policy primer for open source projects
Open source projects can use our influence to shape the laws and policies which impact our work, and we can do so while defending ourselves, and each other, from the unintentional consequences of project misuse.
Lessons from the road: raising awareness of data protection and privacy in open source projects
In late November I was honoured to be asked to speak at the annual conference of the National Association of Data Protection Officers in London. My slides are available to …