Articles

Time to cut ties with the digital oligarchs and rewire the web

Facebook’s reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially without their consent, and that when Facebook found out about this, it did pathetically little. We only know this thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower. This is yet another scandal in a troubled period for the company, with a growing sense that it is all profit, no responsibility. But the current malaise goes wider than Facebook. On the internet more widely, the advertising-supported model has demanded its payout, and as a result our experience of the web is getting worse. Like rats scrambling to get back on a sinking ship, senior former-Facebookers are lining up to express regrets. It all feels too little, too late.

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The census is too important to boycott, despite serious privacy concerns

First published on Sydney Morning Herald.

One of Australia’s richest sources of statistical data has had both its reputation and trust destroyed by the decision to retain name and address data – a decision made with little consultation and with no regard to the ramifications for individual’s right to privacy. But does this warrant an overall boycott of the census?

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If you're worried about privacy, you should worry about the 2016 census

First published on ABC The Drum

If you blinked, you missed it. On December 18 last year, the Australia Bureau of Statistics announced that at the 2016 census in August it would, for the first time, retain all the names and addresses it has collected “to enable a richer and dynamic statistical picture of Australia“.

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Big Data, Big Opportunities

We are living in a data saturated world, which presents a range of challenges and exciting possibilities for human rights lawyers and activists. The age of computers, the internet, and smart phones has created an unprecedented number of information sensing devices, generating lots of data about their users. Examples of such data include shopping habits, individual location and movements, political opinions, internet searches, friend networks, social media use, and even health information.

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Government haste lays waste to consultation

Inadequate consultation and seemingly unnecessary haste in drafting and passing certain laws has been a shared frustration linking diverse policy issues in the past year.

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Australian court holds Google is responsible for linking to defamatory websites

The South Australian Supreme Court this week found that Google is legally responsible when its search results link to defamatory content on the web.

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