Privacy-aware Linked Widgets

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) brings new challenges for companies, who must demonstrate that their systems and business processes comply with usage constraints specified by data subjects. However, due to the lack of standards, tools, and best practices, many organizations struggle to adapt their infrastructure and processes to ensure and demonstrate that all data processing is in compliance with users' given consent. The SPECIAL EU H2020 project has developed vocabularies that can formally describe data subjects' given consent as well as methods that use this description to automatically determine whether processing of the data according to a given policy is compliant with the given consent. Whereas this makes it possible to determine whether processing was compliant or not, integration of the approach into existing line of business applications and ex-ante compliance checking remains an open challenge. In this short paper, we demonstrate how the SPECIAL consent and compliance framework can be integrated into Linked Widgets, a mashup platform, in order to support privacy-aware ad-hoc integration of personal data. The resulting environment makes it possible to create data integration and processing workflows out of components that inherently respect usage policies of the data that is being processed and are able to demonstrate compliance. We provide an overview of the necessary meta data and orchestration towards a privacy-aware linked data mashup platform that automatically respects subjects' given consents. The evaluation results show the potential of our approach for ex-ante usage policy compliance checking within the Linked Widgets Platforms and beyond

MCTs and universities: new risks, new visibilities and new vulnerabilities

Universities have long used new technologies to enhance teaching but mobile communication technologies (MCTs) are posing new ethical and policy challenges. The capture functions on MCTs bring considerable benefits in terms of a student being able to play back and review what was said in the teaching rooms. However, the convergence and connectivity of web 2.0 and its successors add new, as yet largely uncharted dimensions. It not only extends the classroom but also renders previously bounded teaching and residential spaces porous as anybody who has access to these rooms and a MCT can capture and open to outside scrutiny what previously would have been relatively private spaces. This has contradictory ethical implications. Abuses of power and indiscretions can be held to account before wider public opinion. However, the capture and dissemination of sensitive personal information in the form of the opinions, beliefs and ideas of students and staff can expose individuals to risk. Furthermore, the technologies also enable acceptable content to be edited and/or reformed into mashups that may not be intended to be malicious but have the potential for reputational damage. This paper explores these issues first in terms of a range of events and incidents that highlight new vulnerabilities and visibilities. It then outlines some of the policy responses in the United States in terms of cyberbullying; in the UK under data protection; and the implications of a proposed new EU directive. However, it argues, that the fundamental limitation with all of these is that ultimately the institution does not own the device and therefore its control of how it is used is limited. The paper concludes with some preliminary findings on how a handful of British universities are adopting a proactive response here

Mobilizing User-Generated Content For Canada’s Digital Advantage

Executive Summary: The goal of the Mobilizing User-Generated Content for Canada’s Digital Content Advantage project is to define User-Generated Content (UGC) in its current state, identify successful models built for UGC, and anticipate barriers and policy infrastructure needed to sustain a model to leverage the further development of UGC to Canada\u27s advantage. At the outset, we divided our research into three domains: creative content, small scale tools and collaborative user-generated content. User-generated creative content is becoming increasingly evident throughout the technological ecology through online platforms and online social networks where individuals develop, create and capture information and choose to distribute content through an online platform in a transformative manner. The Internet offers many tools and resources that simplify the various UGC processes and models. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and others provide functionality to upload content directly into the site itself, eliminating the need for formatting and conversion, and allowing almost instantaneous access to the content by the user’s social network. The successful sites have been able to integrate content creation, aggregation, distribution, and consumption into a single tool, further eroding some of the traditional dichotomies between content creators and end-users. Along with these larger scale resources, this study also treats small scale tools, which are tools, modifications, and applications that have been created by a user or group of users. There are three main categories of small scale tools. The first is game modifications, or add-ons, which are created by users/players in order to modify the game or assist in its play. The second is modifications, objects, or tools created for virtual worlds such as Second Life. Third, users create applications and tools for mobile devices, such as the iPhone or the Android system. The third domain considers UGC which is generated collaboratively. This category is comprised of wikis, open source software and creative content authored by a group rather than a sole individual. Several highly successful examples of collaborative UGC include Wikipedia, and open source projects such as the Linux operating system, Mozilla Firefox and the Apache platform. Major barriers to the production, distribution and aggregation of collaborative UGC are unduly restrictive intellectual property rights (including copyrights, licensing requirements and technological protection mechanisms). There are several crucial infrastructure and policies required to facilitate collaborative UGC. For example, in the area of copyright policy, a careful balance is needed to provide appropriate protection while still allowing downstream UGC creation. Other policy considerations include issues pertaining to technological protection mechanisms, privacy rights, consumer protection and competition. In terms of infrastructure, broadband internet access is the primary technological infrastructure required to promote collaborative UGC creation. There has recently been a proliferation of literature pertaining to all three of these domains, which are reviewed. Assessments are made about the most effective models and practices for each domain, as well as the barriers which impede further developments. This initial research is used as a basis for generating some tentative conclusions and recommendations for further research about the policy and technological infrastructures required to best mobilize and leverage user-generated content to create additional value in the digital economy internal and external to Canada. Policy recommendations based on this research focus on two principles: balancing the interest of both content owners and users, and creating an enabling environment in which UGC production, distribution, aggregation, and re-use can flourish

Towards a cyber physical system for personalised and automatic OSA treatment

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a breathing disorder that takes place in the course of the sleep and is produced by a complete or a partial obstruction of the upper airway that manifests itself as frequent breathing stops and starts during the sleep. The real-time evaluation of whether or not a patient is undergoing OSA episode is a very important task in medicine in many scenarios, as for example for making instantaneous pressure adjustments that should take place when Automatic Positive Airway Pressure (APAP) devices are used during the treatment of OSA. In this paper the design of a possible Cyber Physical System (CPS) suited to real-time monitoring of OSA is described, and its software architecture and possible hardware sensing components are detailed. It should be emphasized here that this paper does not deal with a full CPS, rather with a software part of it under a set of assumptions on the environment. The paper also reports some preliminary experiments about the cognitive and learning capabilities of the designed CPS involving its use on a publicly available sleep apnea database

Attempting to Close the Digital Frontier: A Mixed-Methods Approach to the Study of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

A mixed-methods approach was taken to study the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), recent legislation that would have considerable effects on the digital landscape. The combined methods help to define the problems underlying the legislation by defining stakeholders and isolating views from various media sources. The theoretical examinations of landscape studies, communications geography and Panopticism combined with methodology in political geography, and media analysis helps to develop a multi-angled view of the current perspective on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Landscape studies, with roots in Sauer\u27s seminal work, The Morphology of Landscape, contributed to the narrative of the research by helping to construct a sense of place. Communications geography and critical GIS help to ground the digital landscape in the field of geography. Political geography and the choropleth map illustrate the spatial patterns of politics surrounding the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, concluding that widespread approval of the legislation in the House of Representatives spans mostly rural Republican areas, while lack of support comes from more Democratic areas. Discourse analysis and term frequency analysis assist in the utilization of the internet as text, evaluating media responses to the legislation. Overall, the three media type nodes analyzed included mainstream media, personal blogs, and tech blogs. These nodes had a homogeneous view against the proposed legislation with subtle differences in word frequency around one percent of the corpus. The media corpus was then analyzed against the legislation\u27s word frequency, showing remarkable differences. For example, the word privacy occurred close to thirty percent in CISPA compared to the one percent in the media corpus. Reading through the documents, a consensus was made that though the legislation mentions protecting the privacy of internet users, it lacks methods to ensure it, which was one of the defining problems that has prevented the legislation\u27s passage in the Senate

Legal crowdsourcing and relational law : what the semantic web can do for legal education

Crowdsourcing and Relational Law are interrelated concepts that can be successfully applied to the legal domain and, more specifically, to the field of legal education. 'Crowdsourcing' means 'participation of people (crowds)' and refers theoretically to the aggregated production of a common knowledge in a global data space. 'Relational law' refers to the regulatory link between Web 2.0 and 3.0, based on trust and dialogue, which emerges from the intertwining of top-down existing legal systems and bottom-up participation (the Web of People). Legal education today has a major role to play in the broad space opened up in terms of future potential of the Semantic Web. The following paper places a lens on the educational value of crowdsourcing and the relational approach to governance and law

Data mashups: potential contribution to decision support on climate change and health.

notes: PMCID: PMC3945564This is a freely-available open access publication. Please cite the published version which is available via the DOI link in this record.Linking environmental, socioeconomic and health datasets provides new insights into the potential associations between climate change and human health and wellbeing, and underpins the development of decision support tools that will promote resilience to climate change, and thus enable more effective adaptation. This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities presented by advances in data collection, storage, analysis, and access, particularly focusing on "data mashups". These data mashups are integrations of different types and sources of data, frequently using open application programming interfaces and data sources, to produce enriched results that were not necessarily the original reason for assembling the raw source data. As an illustration of this potential, this paper describes a recently funded initiative to create such a facility in the UK for use in decision support around climate change and health, and provides examples of suitable sources of data and the purposes to which they can be directed, particularly for policy makers and public health decision makers.UK Medical Research CouncilUK Natural Environment Research CouncilEuropean Regional Development Fund Programme 2007 to 2013European Social Fund Convergence Programme for Cornwall and the Isles of Scill