Per december 2014 is Prof. dr. Nico van Eijk toegetreden tot de kenniskring van de Commissie van Toezicht betreffende de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (CTIVD). Deze kenniskring dient de Commissie te adviseren over technologische, juridische en maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen die van belang zijn voor het toezicht op de inlichtingen- en veiligheidsdiensten. Leden van de kenniskring kunnen tevens worden ingezet teneinde tegenspraak te leveren in lopende onderzoeken.
De CTIVD heeft de betrokken ministers alsmede de Tweede Kamer op 23 december jl. hierover geïnformeerd. De brief is te raadplegen via de onderstaande link.

Brief aan de minister-president.

 

IViR at Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conferentie (CPDP) 2015: Data Protection on the Move
Brussels, 21-23 januari 2015.

At CPDP 2015 IViR organised a panel on “Privacy by analogy: Lessons from copyright law, environmental law, consumer protection law and compliance with financial regulations”. CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection. Within an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, computer scientists and civil society from all over the world to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.

 

IViR at Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conferentie (CPDP) 2015: Data Protection on the Move
Brussels, 21-23 januari 2015.

At CPDP 2015 IViR organised a panel on “Privacy by analogy: Lessons from copyright law, environmental law, consumer protection law and compliance with financial regulations”. CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection. Within an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, computer scientists and civil society from all over the world to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.

 

The Institute for Information Law is very proud to announce that Prof. Dr. Natali Helberger has been awarded with a ERC Starting Grant. A Starting Grant is a personal grant of 1.5 million euros which is meant to support talented researchers for a period of five years while they conduct research.

She will receive the grant for her research titled:

Profiling and Targeting News Readers: Implications for the Democratic Role of the Digital Media, User Rights and Public Information Policy

Within the digital media environment, user attention is scare and competition for ‘eyeballs’ is fierce. The personalisation of media content is seen by many as a solution; with the help of (Big) Data and clever algorithms, users receive news and adverts that are tailored to their individual interests and tastes. Personalisation, however, is also part of a more fundamental paradigm shift in the media’s role from public interest intermediary to personal information coach. In her project, Hellberger will answer critical questions about the consequences of this shift for individual media users, the public debate and the role of personalised media in a democratic society.

See also the UvA website ERC Starting Grant for nine UvA and AMC-UvA researchers and Foliaweb UvA-hoogleraar Helberger ontvant ERC Starters Grant (in Dutch).

On 19 September 2014 Natali Helberger held her inaugural speech at the UvA on a related topic: Media and users: towards a new balance.

The Institute for Information Law is very proud to announce that Prof. Dr. Natali Helberger has been awarded with a ERC Starting Grant. A Starting Grant is a personal grant of 1.5 million euros which is meant to support talented researchers for a period of five years while they conduct research.

She will receive the grant for her research titled:

Profiling and Targeting News Readers: Implications for the Democratic Role of the Digital Media, User Rights and Public Information Policy

Within the digital media environment, user attention is scare and competition for ‘eyeballs’ is fierce. The personalisation of media content is seen by many as a solution; with the help of (Big) Data and clever algorithms, users receive news and adverts that are tailored to their individual interests and tastes. Personalisation, however, is also part of a more fundamental paradigm shift in the media’s role from public interest intermediary to personal information coach. In her project, Hellberger will answer critical questions about the consequences of this shift for individual media users, the public debate and the role of personalised media in a democratic society.

See also the UvA website ERC Starting Grant for nine UvA and AMC-UvA researchers and Foliaweb UvA-hoogleraar Helberger ontvant ERC Starters Grant (in Dutch).

On 19 September 2014 Natali Helberger held her inaugural speech at the UvA on a related topic: Media and users: towards a new balance.

 

Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments: A Data-Driven Approach
 

Recently Joan-Josep Vallbé published a new book in the Law, Governance and Technology Series. See Springer for more information about the book.

 

Summary:
This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable.

While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances  organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality” of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments.

This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

 

Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments: A Data-Driven Approach
 

Recently Joan-Josep Vallbé published a new book in the Law, Governance and Technology Series. See Springer for more information about the book.

 

Summary:
This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable.

While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances  organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of “institutional rationality” of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments.

This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

Google en het recht om vergeten te worden

Vrijdagmiddag 21 november 2014, 14.30-17.15 uur
Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam

Op 13 mei 2014 heeft het Hof van Justitie een spraakmakende uitspraak gedaan in de zaak Google/Spain. Individuele burgers hebben het recht om voortaan bepaalde zoekresultaten niet meer te laten terugkomen wanneer op hun naam gezocht wordt in de Google-zoekmachine. Het geeft de burger stevig gereedschap in handen om het ‘recht om vergeten te worden’ te effectueren. Er zouden inmiddels al meer dan 100.000 verzoeken bij Google zijn binnengekomen om links naar allerlei soorten inhoud te verwijderen: strafbladgegevens, gênante foto's, cyberpesten, beschuldigingen van tientallen jaren geleden, negatieve persartikelen. Hoe gaat dit uitpakken? Ligt censuur op de loer? Op 18 september 2014 deed de Nederlandse rechter de eerste uitspraak over de wijze waarop Google invulling geeft aan het arrest van het Hof van Justitie.

De Vereniging voor Media- en Communicatierecht (VMC) belegt op vrijdag 21 november een Studiemiddag over the right to be forgotten. Aan de orde komen ook the right to erasure zoals in de komende General Data Protection Regulation opgenomen, en de uitdagingen voor het bedrijfsleven bij de feitelijke implementatie daarvan.

De volgende sprekers belichten het onderwerp vanuit verschillende invalshoeken.

• Ot van Daalen – advocaat bij Digital Defence en privacy-onderzoeker bij het Instituut voor Informatierecht van de UvA;
• Peter Olsthoorn – journalist en schrijver, onder meer van de boeken De Macht van Google en Privacy bestaat niet, doe er je voordeel mee;
• Simone van Ginhoven en Marlies Blokland – beiden legal counsel bij Vodafone.

Dagvoorzitter is Prof. Nico van Eijk. Na de inleidingen is er zoals gebruikelijk ruimte voor discussie, en de middag wordt afgesloten met een borrel.

Toegang is voor leden gratis. Niet-leden betalen Euro 20,=. Indien u advocaat bent en een deelname-certificaat wilt hebben om de gevolgde Studiemiddag voor twee opleidingspunten te kunnen opgeven bij de NOvA, dit graag aangeven bij de aanmelding.

Aanmelding kan plaatsvinden door een email te sturen naar studiemiddag@mediaforum.nl

Google en het recht om vergeten te worden

Vrijdagmiddag 21 november 2014, 14.30-17.15 uur
Trippenhuis, Kloveniersburgwal 29, Amsterdam

Op 13 mei 2014 heeft het Hof van Justitie een spraakmakende uitspraak gedaan in de zaak Google/Spain. Individuele burgers hebben het recht om voortaan bepaalde zoekresultaten niet meer te laten terugkomen wanneer op hun naam gezocht wordt in de Google-zoekmachine. Het geeft de burger stevig gereedschap in handen om het ‘recht om vergeten te worden’ te effectueren. Er zouden inmiddels al meer dan 100.000 verzoeken bij Google zijn binnengekomen om links naar allerlei soorten inhoud te verwijderen: strafbladgegevens, gênante foto's, cyberpesten, beschuldigingen van tientallen jaren geleden, negatieve persartikelen. Hoe gaat dit uitpakken? Ligt censuur op de loer? Op 18 september 2014 deed de Nederlandse rechter de eerste uitspraak over de wijze waarop Google invulling geeft aan het arrest van het Hof van Justitie.

De Vereniging voor Media- en Communicatierecht (VMC) belegt op vrijdag 21 november een Studiemiddag over the right to be forgotten. Aan de orde komen ook the right to erasure zoals in de komende General Data Protection Regulation opgenomen, en de uitdagingen voor het bedrijfsleven bij de feitelijke implementatie daarvan.

De volgende sprekers belichten het onderwerp vanuit verschillende invalshoeken.

• Ot van Daalen – advocaat bij Digital Defence en privacy-onderzoeker bij het Instituut voor Informatierecht van de UvA;
• Peter Olsthoorn – journalist en schrijver, onder meer van de boeken De Macht van Google en Privacy bestaat niet, doe er je voordeel mee;
• Simone van Ginhoven en Marlies Blokland – beiden legal counsel bij Vodafone.

Dagvoorzitter is Prof. Nico van Eijk. Na de inleidingen is er zoals gebruikelijk ruimte voor discussie, en de middag wordt afgesloten met een borrel.

Toegang is voor leden gratis. Niet-leden betalen Euro 20,=. Indien u advocaat bent en een deelname-certificaat wilt hebben om de gevolgde Studiemiddag voor twee opleidingspunten te kunnen opgeven bij de NOvA, dit graag aangeven bij de aanmelding.

Aanmelding kan plaatsvinden door een email te sturen naar studiemiddag@mediaforum.nl

IVIR and the Digital Methods Initiative of UvA's Media Studies department have won a grant from the University of California's Berkely Center for Law and Technology.

Public sector bodies are viewed as key sources of open data. Governments around the world have made opening up data a priority and an integral part of their wider open government agendas. However, there are widespread concerns that releasing government data sets with personal information threatens privacy and related rights and interests.

The project Reconciling Fair Information Principles and Open Data policies examines this tension between open data policy and privacy norms. Legal analysis will be informed by results of state-of-the-art digital research methods. The empirical study will highlight which actors (e.g. government, civil society, private sector) are talking about open data and privacy, what issues they are concerned about, and how these issues are being presented

See the award announcement at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/17848.htm