Conference paper co-authored by Professor Burkhard Schafer shortlisted for best paper award

A paper by Burkhard Schafer and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the universities of Strathclyde and Northumbria has been shortlisted for the Best Paper Award at the 2022 IRIS conference, the largest conference on law and informatics in Europe.   

Their paper, "Making Sense of Trifles: Data Narratives and Cumulative Data Disclosure by Burkhard Schafer, Callum Nash, Emma Nicol, Amal Htait, Jo Briggs, Wendy Moncur, Leif Azzopardi and Dan Carey reports findings from the EPSRC funded project “Cumulative revelations of personal data”. The project develops new tools for employees of safety critical organisations such as bans or law enforcement agencies, but also ordinary citizens, to control the way they disclose information about themselves in a safer and more controlled way.

The envisaged tools will fill gaps in the regulatory approach to data protection that are difficult to address though laws alone. Taking its lead from a Roman law principle, the paper shows how legislative approaches to data protection, such as the GDPR, inevitably struggle to address common risk scenarios: problems that have become particularly visible since the Covid pandemic led to increased working from home, and with that data leakage between private and professional contexts. The paper shows how findings from a workshop with members of the  general public on how to evaluate their own data footprints can inform ways to build assistive technologies that address these risks.