Making sense of our connected world
Demonstrate and Disobey
In February 2014 I had the chance to be a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. As a finishing touch to these exciting weeks,…
The transparent car driver? The Germans’ “favorite child” becomes a data catapult
Recently, various experts spoke out against the transparent car driver. The 52nd German traffic law conference thus postulated that data that were automatically collected while driving may no longer flow…
How the infrastructure of the internet disappeared and why we ought to go look for it
Edward Snowden’s revelations indicate a massive breach of trust in internet infrastructure. However, there is one positive aspect to his revelations: they lead to a greater public awareness for questions…
Black box infrastructure: Do we need transparent interconnection arrangements?
The internet is seething below the surface. Network operators, internet service providers (ISPs), content delivery networks and network-oriented content providers are caught in a struggle for the best position to…
Review of the Workshop: »Cloud Computing and the EU Draft General Data Protection Regulation«
About 30 legal practitioners, computer scientists and social scientists came together to attend the interdisciplinary workshop »Cloud Computing and the EU Draft General Data Protection Regulation. Standards, Design Considerations, and…
Open Government and Open Science – facilitated by “Open Law”
by Julian Staben The initiatives Open Government and Open Science demand the opening of political and scientific processes. While Open Science proclaims the opening of steps of scientific work to…
Surveillance
The state monitors its citizens, Internet companies monitor their users – and finally we monitor ourselves and each other. Who is monitoring whom and why? What positive effects can surveillance have and when does it become a danger for a democratic society? Questions like these were posed by students of the Humboldt University of Berlin in the seminar “Tracing Surveillance – On the Trace of Surveillance” led by HIIG researcher Thomas Christian Bächle. In the contributions to this dossier they discuss their views on state and economic power and surveillance technologies.
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
