Lilian Edwards

Law and the Internet : regulating cyberspace

Part 1 Introduction: introduction, Lilian Edwards and Charlotte Waelde a lawyers introduction to the Internet, Andrew Terrett setting up a legal Web site - pitfalls and promises, John MacKenzie. Part 2 Intellectual property aspects: trade marks and domain names - whats in a name?, Charlotte Waelde copyright and the Internet, Hector MacQueen. Part 3 Electronic commerce: contract formation on the Internet - shattering a few myths, Lars Davies software transactions and contract law, Hector MacQueen legal barriers to electronic contracts - formal requirements and digital signatures, Ian Lloyd the taxation of electronic commerce, Sandra Eden. Part 4 Liability for content on the Internet: defamation and the Internet - name-calling in Cyberspace, Lilian Edwards news without frontiers - pre-trial prejudice and the Internet, Alistair Bonnington computer crime, Paul Cullen governance of pornography and child pornography on the global Internet - a multi-layered approach, Yaman Akdeniz. Part 5 Electronic evidence and procedure: the impact of information technology upon civil practice and procedure, Stuart Gale.

Principles of robotics: regulating robots in the real world

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a set of five ethical principles, together with seven high-level messages, as a basis for responsible robotics. The Principles of Robotics were drafted in 2010 and published online in 2011. Since then the principles have influenced, and continue to influence, a number of initiatives in robot ethics but have not, to date, been formally published. This paper remedies that omission.

'What Happens to My Facebook Profile When I Die?' : Legal Issues Around Transmission of Digital Assets on Death

This chapter will address the social and legal problems of transmission of digital assets on death. It questions whether existing well-known systems of laws and norms for transmission of property and assets on death are fit for the purpose of bequeathing the new “digital assets”. These assets are not simple to define and combine very different categories of assets including, e.g., traditional intellectual property assets such as digitised songs, social network profiles, assets in virtual worlds or games, emails and passwords. In particular it is controversial if (some of) these assets are best viewed as “property” or “obligations”, which has substantial effect on the legal consequences. In practice, at the moment, the area is mainly controlled by privately ordered rules of contract, i.e. the terms and conditions of different service providers, rather than by the general law of property and succession. In the realm of transmission of assets on death, this is unsatisfactory as it means the “rules” vary from site to site, are unclear to users, fail to take account of stakeholder interests and may change on whim.

Privacy, Law, Code and Social Networking Sites

The problems created by the rise of social networks for user privacy have become well known throughout the world since the early paper co-authored by Edwards with Ian Brown of Oxford on data self regulation (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1148732). Reconciling the desire to self-disclose information with the simultaneous desire that this information be protected remains a difficult task, exacerbated by the increasing service provider monetisation of users data via profiling and targeted marketing both when interacting on and off the network itself. Building on the earlier work, this chapter analyses how law, code and norms all currently offer some but insufficient solutions to the problems of online social network privacy when faced with the market drive to make profits. The issues for children and young people are given particular attention, drawing on the work of inter alia boyd, palfrey and Livingstone. Although the law may provide some protections through traditional European DP law remedies, current law suffers from the general illusory nature of consent in the online consumer standard term contract environment. Regulation of SNS terms of service using ideas drawn from EU unfair contracts law may offer some help, bu tbest privacy protection is likely to arise from serious regulation of code in the shape of the defaults for disclosure on the sites themselves. The paper also proposes a user-friendly start up routine where users will shape their privacy preferences in a meaningful fashion and surveys some future solutions posited in the draft EC Data Protection Regulation.

Protecting Post-Mortem Privacy: Reconsidering the Privacy Interests of the Deceased in a Digital World

Post-mortem privacy is not a recognised term of art or institutional category in general succession law or even privacy literature. It may be termed the right of a person to preserve and control what becomes of his or her reputation, dignity, integrity, secrets or memory after their death. While of established concern in disciplines such as psychology, counselling and anthropology, this notion has till now has received relatively little attention in law, especially common law. We argue that the new circumstances of the digital world, and in particular the emergence of a new and voluminous array of “digital assets�? created, hosted and shared on web 2.0 intermediary platforms, and often revealing highly personal or intimate personal data, require a revisiting of this stance. An analysis of comparative common and civilian law institutions, focusing on personality rights, defamation, moral rights and freedom of testation, confirms that there is little support for post-mortem privacy in common law, and while personality rights in general have greater traction in civilian law, including their survival after death, the primary role taken by contract regulation may still mean that users of US-based intermediary platforms, wherever they are based, are deprived of post mortem privacy rights. Having establshed a crucial gap in online legal privacy protection, we suggest future protection may need to come from legislation, contract or “code�? solutions, of which the first emergent into the market is Google Inactive Account Manager.

“I spy, with my little sensor”: fair data handling practices for robots between privacy, copyright and security

ABSTRACT The paper suggests an amendment to Principle 4 of ethical robot design, and a demand for “transparency by design”. It argues that while misleading vulnerable users as to the nature of a robot is a serious ethical issue, other forms of intentionally deceptive or unintentionally misleading aspects of robotic design pose challenges that are on the one hand more universal and harmful in their application, on the other more difficult to address consistently through design choices. The focus will be on transparent design regarding the sensory capacities of robots. Intuitive, low-tech but highly efficient privacy preserving behaviour is regularly dependent on an accurate understanding of surveillance risks. Design choices that hide, camouflage or misrepresent these capacities can undermine these strategies. However, formulating an ethical principle of “sensor transparency” is not straightforward, as openness can also lead to greater vulnerability and with that security risks. We argue that the discussion on sensor transparency needs to be embedded in a broader discussion of “fair data handling principles” for robots that involve issues of privacy, but also intellectual property rights such as copyright.

From Privacy Impact Assessment to Social Impact Assessment

In order to address the continued decline in consumer trust in all things digital, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), we propose a radical overhaul of IoT design processes. Privacy by Design has been proposed as a suitable framework, but we argue the current approach has two failings: it presents too abstract a framework to inform design, and it is often applied after many critical design decisions have been made in defining the business opportunity. To rebuild trust we need the philosophy of Privacy by Design to be transformed into a wider Social Impact Assessment and delivered with practical guidance to be applied at product/service concept stage as well as throughout the systems engineering.

Privacy in Public Spaces: What Expectations of Privacy Do We Have in Social Media Intelligence?

In this paper we give an introduction to the transition in contemporary surveillance from top down traditional police surveillance to profiling and “pre-crime” methods. We then review in more detail the rise of open source (OSINT) and social media (SOCMINT) intelligence and its use by law enforcement and security authorities. Following this we consider what if any privacy protection is currently given in UK law to SOCMINT. Given the largely negative response to the above question, we analyse what reasonable expectations of privacy there may be for users of public social media, with reference to existing case law on art 8 of the ECHR. Two factors are in particular argued to be supportive of a reasonable expectation of privacy in open public social media communications: first, the failure of many social network users to perceive the environment where they communicate as “public”; and secondly, the impact of search engines (and other automated analytics) on traditional conceptions of structured dossiers as most problematic for state surveillance. Lastly, we conclude that existing law does not provide adequate protection for open SOCMINT and that this will be increasingly significant as more and more personal data is disclosed and collected in public without well-defined expectations of privacy.

The internet and security: do we need a man with a red flag walking in front of every computer?

This editorial focusses on the topic of internet security; its real, or perceived threats to individuals, and the regulatory framework in place to deal with cybercrime. Edwards suggests some obligations for computer owners as an attempt to ensure the security of their computer.