Public discourses have become sensitive to the ethical challenges of big data and artificial intelligence, as scandals about privacy invasion, algorithmic discrimination, and manipulation in digital platforms repeatedly make news headlines. However, it remains largely unexplored how exactly...

Considering calls for more collective approaches to governing data about people, this paper explores how such interventions have been envisioned and enacted by their proponents. I focus on four types of data intermediary: data trusts, decentralised autonomous organisations, data cooperatives and...

Applications of algorithmically informed decisions are becoming entrenched in society,with data processing being their main process and ingredient. While these applications areprogressively gaining momentum, established data protection and privacy rules have struggledto incorporate the...

The essay is written in the form of a magazine article published in 2039 - eleven yearsafter the introduction of NeoTouch, a technology facilitating digital touch as human-to-humancommunication based on a brain-computer interface (BCI). The article follows Barbara, a youngwoman who recently had...

It is 2038. In our data-driven future, data has been firmly established as an economicasset and new, data-driven smart technologies have changed the way we live, work, love, thinkand vote. However, privacy laws provide a powerful counterbalance against data usage, stiflinginnovation. Joanne...

News outlets worldwide increasingly adopt user- and system-driven personalisation to individualise their news delivery. Yet, the technical implementation of news personalisation systems, in particular the one relying on algorithmic news recommenders (ANRs) and tailoring individual news...

Cryptoparties (CPs) are a global movement of forums where citizens can come to learn how to improve their digital privacy and security. The present paper is one of the few empirical studies on CPs and is based on participant observation of three CPs. I demonstrate that the organisers of CPs...

How do we come to trust, use and govern virtual private networks (VPNs)? How do these objects of the internet tack back and forth between metaphor and technical processes as they garner usership and critique? This paper aims to answer these questions by considering VPNs as boundary objects. We...

As new legislative battles arise on the EU digital policy front, this article draws on recent EU negotiations related to the making of the Digital Single Market (DSM) to document the main lines of division between member states in this field, as well as coalition patterns in the Council of the...