Selected talks

I don't want to say powerpoint was my first love, but we have shared many formative experiences together.

• Spread of Low Credibility Content by Bots

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, September 2019. Panelist

  A recent academic study explored the spread of low credibility content by bots, and the risks to modern democracy. On the study, and on the possibility and legality of regulating bots to safeguard democracy and society.

• Techlash: Anti-Technology Backlash

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, September 2019. Panelist

  As we focus more on the harms of pervasive technology in society, a lot of attention and blame has been placed worldwide on the largest tech companies in the U.S.A. Do these companies deserve the rap they are getting, and will breaking them up into smaller companies do anything to help?

• #TooSexyForTumblr & Other AI Problems

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, August 2019. Moderator

  Tumblr's AI filter blocking false positives and removing beneficial content, and the human judgment missing from it. Whether this is a sign of things to come across social media, or across internet content generally.

• Indictment of Julian Assange & the First Amendment

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, August 2019. Panelist

  Regardless of what you think about Julian Assange, his indictment by the U.S. for his work on Wikileaks has implications for the future of journalism and the First Amendment that we must not ignore.

• Bias in Facial Recognition

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, August 2019. Moderator

  Why facial recognition identifies women and minorities less accurately, and the risks to individual liberty from mis-identification.

• Emerging Voices & Popular Movements for Peace in Cyberspace

  CyFy Africa, Tangier, June 2019. Panelist

  Governments weaponising software for national security, with civilians and emerging economies as the collateral, and the movement forming against it: Digital Peace Now, the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, and the Contract for the Web.

• Internet Health Report Speedtalk

  CyFy Africa, Tangier, June 2019

• Tumblr, Porn, Sex Work and Queer Lives on a Healthy Internet: What happens when a platform decides to kill communities?

  RightsCon, Tunis, June 2019. Organizer and panelist

  In late 2018, Tumblr announced it was banning NSFW content. While Tumblr does not have a legal obligation to host any of this content, the sudden and short-notice sterilization of millions of accounts, years of content, and archives of queer history is one with wide-reaching effects. What responsibility do platforms have to existing communities? Is it possible for a marginalized digital community to develop at scale without the infrastructure and goodwill of a major corporation? And what happens in a diaspora of hundreds of thousands of content creators, with few platforms willing to host them?

• Limitations of CC Licensing in the Age of Machine Learning

  Creative Commons Global Summit, Lisbon, May 2019. Lightning talk

  Maps RFC 7258, the IETF's "pervasive monitoring is an attack", onto machine-learning data mining, with IBM's use of Creative Commons photographs for facial-recognition training as the exhibit. Asks Creative Commons to declare intent-subverting uses unapproved, or failing that to give creators a machine-readable opt-out.

• Informe de la Salud de Internet / Mozilla's Internet Health Report

  Cumbre Dircom, Medellín, May 2019

• Internet Privacy: The 10-Year Challenge

  Scientista Symposium, Harvard Medical School, Boston, March 2019. Co-presenter

  Remember what you posted online in 2009? Someone else does. Starting from the viral "10 Year Challenge" meme, this talk traces how the data we hand over today becomes a liability tomorrow, from weaponized old tweets to facial recognition to China's social credit system. Drawing on Bruce Schneier's argument that stored data is a toxic asset, it covers practical protections and free privacy tools. An interactive session, especially useful for researchers handling sensitive data. With Abigail Cabunoc Mayes.

• Mozilla's Internet Health Report

  United Nations Headquarters, Sustainable Development Goals event, New York, 2019

• Internet Health Around The World

  MozFest, London, October 2018. Session lead

  Members of the report's global committee, from Africa, Asia and Latin America, presenting their own local internet-health work rather than having it presented for them. With Shreyas Narayanan Kutty, Solange Tuyisenge, Juma Baldeh, Edoardo Viola, Geraldo Barros and Solana Larsen.

• AI & Personalized Propaganda on Social Media

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, September 2018. Panelist

  In the old days, propaganda pushed the same message to millions. Now with deep data analysis and artificial intelligence, propaganda can be customized, personalized, and automated at mass scale. What are the implications to a free society?

• CLOUD Act: CLOUDing the Future of Privacy

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, September 2018. Panelist

  What is the CLOUD Act, what are MLATs, and how is our privacy being affected? Is there any relationship to Third Party Doctrine or the recent Carpenter Supreme Court decision?

• Deepfakes and Revenge Porn Update

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, August 2018. Panelist

  The problem of deepfakes, realistic computer replacements of faces on other peoples' bodies, and the latest changes in law regarding revenge porn, the posting of intimate pictures without consent as a form of personal revenge.

• GDPR: Intended and Unintended Consequences

  Electronic Frontiers Forums, DragonCon, Atlanta, August 2018. Panelist

  Europe's GDPR is ambitious and breathtaking in its scope and scale, and caused much anxiety as the enforcement deadline approached. What are the consequences of its sudden implementation, and is the cause of user privacy really being advanced?

• Is the Internet Sick? Findings from Mozilla's Internet Health Report

  The Circle of HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), New York, July 2018

  Our personal credit details have been stolen en masse. Social media has been weaponized as a tool of cruel harassment. The democratic process has been undermined by the manipulation of online news and ads. We are beginning to see the health of the Internet as not just a technical issue, but a human one. Mozilla's Internet Health Report is an open-source project that documents and explains how people worldwide are interacting with and affected by our connected world. The report aims to provide a "big picture" of the global state of health of the Internet through the prism of five core issues: privacy and security, openness, digital inclusion, web literacy, and decentralization.

• The Internet Health Report

  Sektor 3.0, Warsaw, May 2018

• Open data, open research: fuel for a healthier internet

  Creative Commons Global Summit, Toronto, April 2018. Co-presenter

  Online life is real life, but the systems that underpin the internet are increasingly opaque to everyday users. Research is vital to understanding how the connected world works and who holds power, and that research is not always open; even when it is, it can be difficult to gather or make sense of.

• Engaging Union Members Online

  CAW Communications Conference, Port Elgin, Ontario, November 2009. Keynote plenary, with Audra Williams

• The Heresy of Zone Defence

  Central Bank Online Communications Group, Banco de México, Mexico City, 2009

• New Directions in Web Presence

  Central Bank Online Communications Group, Banco de México, Mexico City, 2009

• Social Media in the Public Service

  PodCamp Toronto, Toronto, 2009. Co-presenter

  Using social media to reach audiences outside an institution, and to demystify the public service enough that people engage with it. With Audra Williams, then of the Parliament of Canada.

• The Usability Myth

  European Central Bank, Frankfurt, 2008