Blurb: (hackathons, online safety bill report, digital rights conference)

The catalyst this past decade has been technology: Social media have dominated communications – just imagine that Instagram turned 10 this year! The gig economy disrupted task based labour: The phrase “drive me back home” became relevant, as the driver might not be a professional driver (thanks Uber!) and home might not be your own home (thanks Airbnb!). We gained new friends – Alexa and Siri are always there for us, lending an ear. As the pandemic started taking over the world in 2020, we all slowed down. The world stood still for a while. And reflected. In today’s fast-paced academic environment we are rarely given the chance to explore current matters from such a wide angle: in studying digital rights, we aim to bring in a generalist perspective that transcends disciplinary boundaries and specialisms. 

Digital Rights 2.0 Conference

Our Digital Rights 2.0. Symposium in July 2021 marked a ten year anniversary since the “Digital Rights 1.0” conference held at the University of Leeds and chaired by Dr Karanasiou. The main aim of this symposium has been to establish a venue for exploring with the research community the ways in which human rights have been shaped by emerging technologies over the past ten years. This is a decade that exposed the conceptual fragilities of the rule of law in data-driven environments, a decade characterised by  disillusionment with human rights narratives, beginning with the Snowden revelations in 2013, then the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2015, leading on to the “fake news info-demic” in 2020. Such a revisionist approach not only suggests an innovative means of interpreting social phenomena in a techno-legal setting, but it is much needed as a tool to evaluate past considerations and hypotheses, and explore any lessons learned. 

The Digital Rights 2.0 symposium was co-chaired by Dr Karanasiou and Dr Diker Vanberg and sessions were moderated by Fatimazahra Dehbi, Eva Souchet, and Dilara Altun. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich and Tim Barnes QC delivered opening addresses marking the official start of the event. The Symposium featured keynote speeches from Prof Andrew Murray (LSE) and Prof Roger Brownsword (KCL) and gathered some of the leading voices in Information Technology Law across the world: Prof Mireille Hildebrandt, Radboud University – Vrije Universiteit Brussels; Prof Ian Cram, University of Leeds; Dr Paul Bernal, University of East Anglia; Dr Emily Laidlaw, University of Calgary; Dr Angela Daly, University of Strathclyde; Dr Shara Monteleone, Italian Information Commissioner’s Office; Dr Jasper Sluijs,University of Utrecht; Dr Dariusz Kloza, Vrije Universiteit Brussels; Dr Nicholas Gervassis, University of Plymouth.

DigiRights Hackathon: Human Rights in Smart Cities

At LETS Lab we are driven by a passion to devise pragmatic solutions that involve cross-disciplinary work. In this spirit, our hub has held a few legal hackathons that involved students, practitioners, and professionals from law and computing, working together on projects that promote human rights in digital contexts. 

Our “Data for Good” Hackathon in 2020 was sponsored by the Oxford University Press and the winning project was "StaySafe". Team members were: Sophia Ahmad, Kushla Everitt-Kingston, and Riazil Bhuiyan.