Tech policy is no place for hero fantasies
When someone says the internet is the "wild west", what he's really saying is that he has a personal fantasy about being the sheriff.
Author: Heather Burns
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.
Just how bad is the ICO’s draft age appropriate design code?
The draft Code is a recipe for creating a generation of children who will grow up sheltered, shattered, and shamed, as their outlooks and formative experiences are defined by safety warnings, age gates, and privatised surveillance.
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.
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.
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 interview had to be split into two parts. Part one starts in the grunge era, while part two ends in the future.
Announcement: Mozilla Open Leaders
On #Privacy Day #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.
What I’ll be working on in 2019
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 view here. I was the only non-lawyer on the schedule, and also the only one with no employer or backing institution. For once, I did not mind being the edge case. The audience was full-time salaried data protection professionals, mostly based in central London, and […]
Talking Brexit and a11y at Accessibility Scotland
I was honoured to be invited to speak at this year's Accessibility Scotland conference on Brexit's implications for web accessibility. The video of the talk has now been posted online, and it is fully captioned.