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In March 2020, the Reserve Bank of India's guidelines on Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways prohibited merchants from storing data on cards used by customers. This paper argues that such a prohibition on card data storage impacts upon the ease of transactions for consumers, and effectively tilts consumer preference towards other payment instruments. This runs the risk of technological choices in the industry being made or substantially shaped by the regulator. The documents released lack a costbenefit analysis of this prohibition and do not demonstrate that the chosen intervention is the best one. This raises concerns in the light of emerging Indian jurisprudence on the standards of regulatory governance to be met by statutory regulatory agencies. We show alternative approaches to address concerns relating to breaches of card information stored by consumers on the internet. These include better security standards and liability frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper approaches preventive justice and big data from a predictive policing point of view. Predictive policing is a controversial technology because of the many risks it imposes on fundamental rights. Through use cases from the EU, the paper focuses on how the implementation of predictive policing technologies has been limited in the EU but also how difficult the limitations might be due to the high hopes set upon technology. Although predictive policing technologies are not yet used in Finland by the police, the paper discusses how the use of police powers is limited in Finland and how fundamental rights control in the democratic process will work if the police were willing to adopt such technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining legal studies, ethics and technical insights to shed light on the complex issues surrounding the regulation of predictive analytics. We argue that the individualised concept of regulation, shaped by the dogma of fundamental rights, is unable to adequately capture the implications of predictive analytics. We show that predictive analytics is a problem of collective privacy and informational power asymmetries, and conceptualise the form of data power at work in predictive analytics as 'prediction power'. The unregulated prediction power of certain actors poses societal risks, especially if this form of informational power asymmetry is not normatively represented. The article analyses this legal lacuna in the light of recent case law of the European Court of Justice and new legislation at the EU level. To address these challenges, we develop the concept of 'predictive privacy' as a protected good based on collective interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are exposed to new security risks when they allow employees' personal mobile devices to access the network and the corporate data (a phenomenon called 'Bring Your Own Device' or BYOD). They are confronted with inherent security issues that need to be addressed in order to protect the organization and its information. What are the security issues and considerations associated with BYOD environments? With this in mind, the objective of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of scholarly literature (2010–2019) with respect to BYOD security, and to suggest a classification scheme that depicts a holistic approach to securing BYOD environments. The results of this review include the analysis of 38 scholarly articles, where 22 security issues were identified. Based on the proposed classification scheme, the analysis of the findings shows that 86% of the articles identified security issues and considerations associated with the IT domain, 51% identified security issues related to the Management domain, 45% related to the Users domain, and 19% related to the Mobile Device domain. The results also show that BYOD security issues corresponding to policies are among the most frequently addressed concerns, followed by network security, data protection, user's attitude/behavior and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the special section of the journal is presented which discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on a cognitive neuroscience approach to the protection of information assets, one on factors associated with unethical information technology (IT) use, and another on use of hypergame theory in analyzing the vulnerability of IT-based trading.

The platform economy helps to improve the efficiency of resource allocation and has become a new driving force of China's economic growth. Daojiong Zha's paper "China in International Digital Economy Governance" provides us the international perspective of China's platform economy development. The third perspective for data governance is personal information protection and data security in China's platform economy. [Extracted from the article]

The advent of digital companies has brought benefits to society. Nevertheless, the digital era poses significant risks to consumers’ privacy. The combination, through mergers, of enormous datasets could raise further privacy concerns. It has been much discussed whether and how consumer privacy concerns should be introduced within merger assessment. This paper approaches this issue from another perspective and reflects upon the circumstances under which the EU Merger Control Regulation (EUMR) has a role to address privacy issues. Accordingly, this paper clarifies the conditions that must be satisfied in order for privacy issues to fall within the EUMR’s ambit. First, privacy should be a parameter of competition on the market and second, there must be a causal link between the merger and privacy deterioration. Following this, the paper turns to critically analyse the Commission’s treatment of privacy issues in objectively selected mergers involving some of the most powerful digital companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic litigation against public participation is a threat to public interest journalism. Although typically a defamation claim underpins a SLAPP, the GDPR may serve as an alternative basis. This paper explores how public interest journalism is protected, and could be better protected, from abusive GDPR proceedings. The GDPR addresses the tension between data protection and freedom of expression by providing for a journalistic exemption. However, narrow national implementations of this provision leave the GDPR open for abuse. By analysing GDPR proceedings against newspaper Forbes Hungary, the paper illustrates how the GDPR can be instrumentalised as a SLAPP strategy. As European anti-SLAPP initiatives are finetuned, abusive GDPR proceedings need to be recognised as emerging forms of SLAPPs, requiring more attention to inadequate engagement with European freedom of expression standards in national implementations of the GDPR, data protection authorities' role in facilitating SLAPPs, and the chilling effects of GDPR sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the challenges confronting media companies in protecting media content. According to the author, content and distribution mediums are interdependent with one another making the unwanted transfer of audio and video content practically impossible. However, the link to a specific medium of content is cut and it is now easy to exchange content.

Serious information security breaches have caused firms to suffer from customer churns directly or indirectly. To prevent customer churns, firms usually enhance their security protection through two measures, i.e. security investment and security information sharing. Prior studies seldom consider security environment and business environment simultaneously when making a firm’s optimal security decisions. Using game theory, this paper purports to demonstrate that a firm’s security decisions under a competitive environment differ significantly from those under an integrated environment. Moreover, distortions may surface if firms do not cooperate on security practices. Thus, this paper further analyses the measures that a social planner such as the government or industry association controls firms’ security decisions, and results show that these measures may not always be effective. Instead, social planners are recommended to enhance or attenuate the controlling level of the two security decisions based on realistic security and business environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to study China's data governance policy in the platform economy through reviewing its evolvement, its current challenges, and then provide possible policy recommendations. We review China's data governance policy to show that its focus has switched from security only, to ensure security but at the same time to facility data market so as to encourage the growth of digital economy. We then discuss the governance of data from three perspectives: as a factor of production, algorithm governance, and personal information protection and data security. We recommend the establishment of data governance committee to coordinate data governance issues, including data licensing and algorithm auditing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the present and future uses of intelligent facial surveillance (IFS) in law enforcement. We present an empirical and legally focused case study of live automated facial recognition technologies (LFR) in British policing. In Part I, we analyse insights from 26 frontline police officers exploring their concerns and current scepticism about LFR. We analyse recent UK case law on LFR use by police which raises concerns around human rights, data protection and anti-discrimination laws. In Part II, we consider frontline officers' optimism around future uses of LFR and explore emerging forms of IFS, namely emotional AI (EAI) technologies. A key novelty of the paper is our analysis on how the proposed EU AI Regulation (AIR) will shape future uses of IFS in policing. AIR makes LFR a prohibited form of AI and EAI use by law enforcement will be regulated as high-risk AI that has to comply with new rules and design requirements. Part III presents a series of 10 practical lessons, drawn from our reflections on the legal and empirical perspectives. These aim to inform any future law enforcement use of IFS in the UK and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online courses have become an increasingly attractive format for delivering teacher training. However, the low retention rates are a critical and still unsolved issue. This paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial aimed at testing the impact of a personalized support model on teachers' retention in online training courses. The support consisted of a package of nine messages triggered by teachers' characteristics and their specific (in)actions on the course platform. The study involved 3,777 lower-secondary education professional and student teachers from nine European Union Member States and Turkey, who were invited to participate in four new online courses in school year 2018/2019. The experimental estimates show that the offered support increased course completion by 10 percentage points among professional teachers in EU Member States, while it had no effects among student teachers nor in Turkey. Implications for online teacher training providers—such as the importance of reaching out to participants with poor online training experience and who do not start the courses in time—are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal information, in particular health-related information, used in conjunction with data analytics and shared with researchers, is a valuable tool in health research and development. In light of the public health emergency arising from the COVID-19 pandemic and new African data protection laws, this paper addresses the regulation of data sharing and transfer. Three broad questions addressed are: (i) What are the existing legal modalities governing and protecting data use and sharing in South Africa, and, more generally, in Africa? How can data be transferred into and out of South Africa? (ii) What can be learned from recent international developments in data transfer? And, lastly, (iii) where plausible how might data flows throughout Africa be facilitated in the interests of public health during times of pandemic? This paper explores these questions with specific emphasis on the importance of health and research data transfers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using secondary research from the political, education, and employment fields, this paper aims to demonstrate the consequences of confused and overlapping conceptualizations of the Roma in Hungary as an ethnic group, a racialized minority, a national minority, and a socially disadvantaged group. The resulting cacophony of operationalizing schemes blurs clarity and constrains efficient measures for inclusion policies. In social sciences and law, the purpose of classification is to help us understand the internal logic of concepts. Thus, classification has significant consequences, as it can imperil policy goals. Through examining the case of the Hungarian Roma, the article demonstrates how the confused conceptualization of ethnicity, race, and nationality and ill-applied methods of operationalization have vastly detrimental consequences. In addition, it is argued that many concerns regarding ethnic data processing that policy actors voice are legally unfounded, and pre-existing data protection regimes allow the processing of ethno-racial data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU General Data Protection Regulation was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on May 4 2016 and it will be binding on all member states including the UK, from 25 May 2018. This paper critically examines the implications of Britain's exit from the EU on data protection law in the UK with a particular focus on the various trade models available to the UK such as the EEA model, the Swiss model, the free trade agreement as adopted by Canada, as well as the WTO model. Irrespective of the model chosen for exiting the European Union, the UK will adopt standards almost identical to the GDPR in order to remain a competitive actor in the global economy. Nevertheless, the paper contends that this does not necessarily suffice to secure an adequacy decision from the EU Commission. As clarified in the European Commission's January 2018 Notice, if the UK and the EU cannot reach an agreement on data transfers bureaucratically burdensome requirements could apply to UK businesses. This adds to the prevailing uncertainty around Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms have been increasing their information technology (IT) security budgets significantly to deal with increased security threats. An examination of current practices reveals that managers view security investment as any other and use traditional decision-theoretic risk management techniques to determine security investments. We argue in this paper that this method is incomplete because of the problem's strategic nature--hackers alter their hacking strategies in response to a firm's investment strategies. We propose game theory for determining IT security investment levels and compare game theory and decision theory approaches on several dimensions such as the investment levels, vulnerability, and payoff from investments. We show that the sequential game results in the maximum payoff to the firm, but requires that the firm move first before the hacker. Even if a simultaneous game is played, the firm enjoys a higher payoff than that in the decision theory approach, except when the firm's estimate of the hacker effort in the decision theory approach is sufficiently close to the actual hacker effort. We also show that if the firm learns from prior observations of hacker effort and uses these to estimate future hacker effort in the decision theory approach, then the gap between the results of decision theory and game theory approaches diminishes over time. The rate of convergence and the extent of loss the firm suffers before convergence depend on the learning model employed by the firm to estimate hacker effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical commentary is presented at the complex intersection of child protection and welfare, disability, and internet use. A profound lack of research exists on this topic. Findings from a critical literature review focus on the theme of online risk which included the topic of child abuse/online solicitation, cyber victimization/cyberbullying, problematic internet use, and breach of data protection. The approach taken to review literature was adopted from Aromataris and Pearson (2014). Disabled young people are exposed to and impacted by harmful online content. Key points, and online resources are highlighted for parents and guardians of disabled children, social care practitioners, safeguarding professionals, and educators. This paper attempts to advance scholarly discourse, policy, and practice, the authors arguing that it is time to shift our mindsets about safeguarding disabled young people online from thoughtful attention to purposeful action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy and protection of personal data on the Internet have become issues of public concern in Indonesia. There is growing public distrust of institutions that manage personal data. Poor management of personal data provides a fertile ground for cybercrime and lack of accountability, especially in the context of the new digital economy. In response, the Indonesian Communication Ministry drafted the Personal Data Protection Bill, which has been submitted to the parliament. This paper analyzes the PDP Bill to determine whether it meets international data privacy standards. The EU GDPR is selected as the benchmark for assessment as it is regarded as the toughest privacy law worldwide. The study finds that Indonesian citizens do not have the same level of protection as their European counterparts. Nonetheless, the implementation of this bill when it becomes law will lead to a high level of personal data protection in the new digital economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional Big Data model doesn't explicitly state for both structured and unstructured data sensitivity capture. In addition, the concept of privacy and security needs to be incorporated so that the risk of revealing personal data is subsequently mitigated. This paper proposes Secured Map Reduce Layer (SMR) in the big data structure for optimizing CPU utilization through Hybrid PSO/CS (Particle Swarm Optimization/Cuckoo Search) and Elliptic Curve Cryptographic approaches. This proposed method deals with choosing the private key for Authentication using either particle swarm optimization or cuckoo search algorithm and Provide and encryption and decryption through Key-Value Pair (KVP) of Elliptic Curve Cryptographic. HECC is implemented in a privacy layer called the Secured Map Reduce Layer (SMR). The proposed hybrid model combined with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) that endorses the best value of global fitness for identifying the values and Cuckoo Search (CS) which generates the compiled post-process by finding with efficient authentication. This model provides a promise for privacy and protection in the data. It also solves privacy scalability problems such as CPU and memory optimization retains the trade-off of privacy-utility for big data. There is a remarkable improvement in running time and loss of information over current approaches and optimization of CPU and memory usage. Confidentiality is the process of the sender encrypting through a private key and the public key is utilized to decrypt the document. The protection of the entire algorithm suits a challenge compared with the related techniques through execution speed and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of NGOs in the politicisation of EU security. The focus of the empirical analysis lies on the field of EU counter-terrorism. The cases selected are two different types of legal acts, adopted in the aftermath of serious terrorist attacks in EU member states: The EU data retention directive and the EU passenger name record (PNR) directive. These policies present intrusiveness and relevance for Brussels-based and national civil rights NGOs since they both aim to touch upon individual liberties, like privacy rights or the right to protect personal data. The article goes further by opening up the black box of politicisation. It does so by assuming that politicisation is characterised by a certain level of salience, actor range and polarisation. The paper links politicisation literature to research on the influence of interest groups that are discussing, for example, voice, access or litigation as strategies. Therewith, the paper contributes to the scientific debate on politicisation in two ways: First, it sheds light on the so far disregarded role of NGOs in politicisation. Second, it builds a bridge to interest group literature by examining repertoires of NGOs in politicisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Function creep – the expansion of a system or technology beyond its original purposes – is a well-known phenomenon. Correction: it is a well-referenced phenomenon. Yearly, hundreds of publications use the term to criticise developments in technology regulation and data governance, but surprisingly, no-one has ever written a paper about the concept itself. This paper fills that gap in the literature, by analysing and defining 'function creep'. This creates conceptual clarity that can help structure future debates and address function creep concerns. After analysing the term 'function creep' itself, I discuss concepts that share family resemblances, including other 'creep' concepts and many theoretical notions from STS, economics, sociology, public policy, law, and discourse theory. Function creep can be situated in the nexus of reverse adaptation and self-augmentation of technology, incrementalism and disruption in policy and innovation, policy spillovers, ratchet effects, transformative use, and slippery slope argumentation. Based on this, I define function creep as an imperceptibly transformative and therewith contestable change in a data-processing system's proper activity. Argumentation theory illuminates how the pejorative 'function creep' functions in debates: it makes visible that what looks like linear change is actually non-linear, and simultaneously calls for a much-needed debate about this qualitative change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A networked control system (NCS), which integrates various physical components by utilising communication networks, is a complex intelligent control system with high flexibility and reliability. It has been widely applied in various areas, such as power grids, intelligent transportation, and smart manufacturing. However, compared with traditional control systems, NCSs expose more extra vulnerabilities with the openness of communication networks, leading to long-term concerns for the security of NCSs against cyber attacks. This paper gives a survey in detail on recent developments on the security of NCSs subject to deception attacks from the two domains of information technology (IT) and system control, respectively. First, several security incidents reported in recent years are reviewed and a couple of prevailing cyber attacks are analysed. Besides, the results on IT security with respect to the protection-detection-reaction model are summarised. Then, from the domain of system control, the security issues on attack design, attack detection, secure state estimation and resilient control are surveyed in depth. Furthermore, several novel security topics from the combination of IT and system control are also discussed. Finally, several future research directions are presented on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulating the data market will be one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. In order to think about regulating this market, however, we first need to make its dimensions and dynamics more accessible to observation and analysis. In this paper we explore what the state of the sociological and legal research on markets can tell us about the market for data: what kind of market it is, the practices and configurations of actors that constitute it, and what kinds of data are traded there. We start from the subjective opacity of this market to researchers interested in regulation and governance, review conflicting positions on its extent, diversity and regulability, and then explore comparisons from food and medicine regulation to understand the possible normative and practical implications and aims inherent in attempting to regulate how data is shared and traded. We conclude that there is a strong argument for a normative shift in the aims of regulation with regard to the data market, away from a prioritisation of the economic value of data and toward a more nuanced approach that aims to align the uses of data with the needs and rights of the communities reflected in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federated learning (FL) plays an important role in the development of smart cities. With the evolution of big data and artificial intelligence, issues related to data privacy and protection have emerged, which can be solved by FL. In this paper, the current developments in FL and its applications in various fields are reviewed. With a comprehensive investigation, the latest research on the application of FL is discussed for various fields in smart cities. We explain the current developments in FL in fields, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), transportation, communications, finance, and medicine. First, we introduce the background, definition, and key technologies of FL. Then, we review key applications and the latest results. Finally, we discuss the future applications and research directions of FL in smart cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last half-decade or so, since 2015, data privacy has become an important concern for organizations and consumers alike. Rules and regulations associated with data protection and privacy have led to organizations often reorienting their business model and strategy. The purpose of this paper is to identify and derive the interrelationship between a set of barriers associated with the successful implementation of a business model under evolving privacy laws. The quantitative analysis of Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) is used to derive the relationship between the identified barriers. The study found that although industry and academic experts both discuss privacy by design as the guiding factors towards business re-engineering, cost, and unconscious violations are the actual driving barriers, making the design reactive rather than facilitative. Further, the study also found that while industry experts think most of the barriers are interlinked, including costs, academic experts seem to have a varied opinion, with most of them perceiving cost as an outcome of the design. The findings of the current study are expected to aid the legal cell of an organization in understanding the critical barriers associated with business model re-engineering under the evolving privacy laws and design their strategic plans accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various technological interventions introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak have resulted in numerous challenges, including the protection of informational privacy. Contact tracing applications are one such method adopted by governments worldwide to contain the pandemic. Their key features involve the collection and use of sensitive personal data, such as an individual's personal information, health record, and location, raising concerns among regulators. Regulators must ensure that these technologies align with informational privacy protection. The current legal regime in India is not sophisticated enough to delve into issues that concern contact tracing technology. In India, the introduction of the Aarogya Setu Application (contact tracing application) gained attention when the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) made downloading it mandatory for individuals. Eventually, doing so was made voluntary. Considering these current trends, this paper aims to examine developments in data privacy issues specifically regarding surveillance technologies and tracing applications in India. It highlights and analyzes them considering private players which announced their partnership in creating a robust contact tracing application. The study also adopts a comparative examination of existing contact tracing applications and their privacy policy along with the Indian version and explores how one deploys jurisprudence for informational privacy as perceived in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How far can State and businesses 'play' with personal data, claiming to protect the right to health in pandemic times? This question leeds to the discussion of the possible damage caused by profiling and contact tracing techniques regarding personality rights in relations between ICT companies and States'. By analysing the way European and Inter-American bodies are tackling data protection rules currently in force, the text analyses the consent as a problematic issue, considering both the opt-in and opt-out model are not enough to protect those rights, especially in pandemic times. Although contact tracing might be used in favour of Public Health policies, it may also result in the violation of human rights. Applying the inductive method, this paper proposes a reflection about online behavioural tracking and profiling practices, explaining the efects of personal data mass gathering and the complex relations between businesses activities and human rights. The main conclusion is that all individuals have the same right to privacy, equality and freedom of choice. Thus, States should provide clear and objective rules to be followed by ICT companies, in accordance with international rules, ensuring individual's protection and holding data processors accountable for personal data processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In digital space, the boundaries of privacy are often amorphous, symptomatic of human actors' developing relationship with virtual spaces. As a result, those with little exposure to digital space may simply transplant their 'real world' expectations, whereas those who immerse themselves may assimilate a new perspective on privacy. Firstly, this paper considers the need for comparative research in the privacy field. Secondly, it reflects on the utility of Altman's and Hughes' theories of privacy regulation in the context of digital space. Thirdly, it discusses how privacy interference has been addressed by UK and South African law, focusing on the evolution of data protection. Fourthly, it reflects on the legal implications of the fracturing of responsibility between state and non-state actors. And, lastly, it draws out the consequences of such responsibilisation and how these relate to Altman and Hughes' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel iris image data hiding scheme for privacy protection. Privacy personal data is embedded into the iris image such that its impact on the iris recognition is minimised. This is achieved by restricting the modifications of the embedding within the regions that seldom affects the iris recognition with the help of the STC (syndrome trellis coding) framework. We also propose a novel distortion function to measure the impact of the data embedding on iris recognition, where the regions with important iris features are assigned with high embedding cost. Experimental results show that, by using our proposed scheme, we can embed sufficient data into the iris image with high recognition accuracy maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the results of a Europe-wide survey on the implementation of CoE Recommendation R (2000)13 on a European policy on access to archives conducted in October 2022 on behalf of the Council of Europe (CoE). It shows that overall great progress has been made in improving access to their public Archives. It also shows that there are still deficits in some instances, for example in the availability of finding aids for classified holdings or in the granting of access corrections for otherwise inaccessible archive holdings. We also highlight several challenges to the accessibility of archives, many of which are related to the ongoing process of digitalization. On the one hand, there is the growing expectation of users that collections be digitized and made accessible online, while at the same time the available resources of the Archives remain scarce. Finally, digitalization and the adoption of the GDPR also exacerbate the tension between data protection and freedom of information — often at the detriment of accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outsourcing of Electronic Health Records (EHR) on cloud infrastructures has enabled medical data sharing among several healthcare applications. The blockchain offers security by authenticating users with encryption methods. The collaboration with the cloud provides better management but poses threats to the privacy of the patient. This paper devises a novel blockchain-assisted framework for effective data sharing and retrieval using cloud platforms. Here, the data protection model is devised in EHR application for secure transmission. The entities in the cloud platform include data user, data owner, smart agreement, transactional blockchain, and Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). Here, the data owner includes a data protection model to secure EHR in which secured EHR is transferred to IPFS before sharing with the data user. The data protection is done by preserving data privacy using Tracy-Singh product and proposed Conditional Autoregressive Value at risk (CAViaR)-based Bird swarm algorithm (CAViaR-based BSA) combination of BSA and CAViaR for generating optimal privacy-preserving coefficients. The objective function is newly devised considering privacy and utility. The proposed CAViaR-based BSA outperformed other methods with minimal responsiveness of 251.339 s, maximal genuine user detection of 32.451%, maximal privacy of 96.5%, and minimal information loss of 3.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Want to ensure data integrity? Want to know if a file has been altered? Checksum, please! Checksums have a variety of applications, such as verifying that an application has been installed correctly and providing a method of verifying whether or not a file has been altered. For example, checksums can be used in a SAS® program to verify that a comma delimited (comma-separated values, CSV) file has not been altered before importing the CSV file into a SAS dataset. Fortunately, all operating systems have some utility available to do checksums. This paper will provide some background on the use of checksums and concentrate on a particular example using lab instrument data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy advocates and hacker activists ('hacktivists') oppose biometric technologies, such as electronic fingerprinting and facial recognition, that are increasingly used to sort and identify people. This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork among technology experts and hacktivists in Denmark and Germany to explore how these individuals work to resist the encroachment of surveillance technologies in their physical and digital lives. Particular attention is paid to the practices they use to mask their locations, communications, and legal identities, thereby negotiating the border between public and private. This article describes how hacktivists exchange information about data protection and border-crossing to illustrate how encryption and other steps to protect privacy can be understood as moral practices. As opposed to common legal and philosophical definitions that characterise the right to privacy as inherent to the liberal, individual self, I suggest that hacktivists are advancing novel understandings of both identity and privacy as relational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract—Microgrids usually operate in grid-connected or islanded mode. Due to substantial variation in fault current, same protection coordination scheme cannot be applied in both modes. Moreover, network topology keeps on changing due to momentary events. In this paper, an adaptive protection strategy is proposed to avoid any miscoordination between numerical directional overcurrent relays under a fault instance. Through this scheme, the relay settings can be updated online as per the operating mode and prevailing topology. The proposed tactic employs a central protection center with data storage and programming capability, smart electronic devices and communication channels to acquire and transfer real-time data. The relay coordination problem is formulated as a non-linear optimization function, with coordination time interval constraints. The optimal relay settings under both operating modes are obtained through non-linear programming and hybrid genetic algorithm non-linear programming method. To handle contingencies of communication channel failure, a novel inclusive mode settings are also introduced to protect the system in both modes even with line or DG outages. The proposed adaptive approach is tested on a nine bus radial distribution system with DGs. It has been found that the proposed scheme provides reliable system protection under different operating scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observation that spatial and environmental data relating to specific locations or geographic areas in the European Union (EU) have been difficult to find online is undisputed. Whether the EU INSPIRE Directive of 2007 which establishes an infrastructure to enable the sharing of spatial data and services to support European and national environmental policies will achieve its objectives is a topic of debate. The INSPIRE Directive was conceived and implemented to address identifiable challenges relating to environmental policies and data. Before the complete implementation of the Directive, it may be necessary to reflect on what progress have been achieved at a legal and policy level. The central argument of this paper is that legal and policy issues may have hindered the rapid and smooth implementation of the Directive. The implementation of the legal framework of the Directive provides salutary lessons. Evaluation reports from the European Commission and the four case studies demonstrably paint an encouraging future. The conclusion is that INSPIRE should foster good governance, use and sharing of environmental data and information for the common good of all Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that security is governed exclusively by nation states exercising political authority to generate public security goods, the European Union can also be considered a security state: it governs security indirectly by making rules incentivising and steering the provision of public security goods. To what degree, however, does the EU govern defence markets, shape the trajectory of national defence capabilities, and direct efforts towards European strategic autonomy? This paper traces the EU's attempts to regulate arms production and identifies critical junctures in EU authority as a market rule-maker over the means of force. It finds that market rule-takers—non-state defence firms—are shaped by EU epistemic authority and regulation. Specifically, EU rule-making shapes firm perceptions of relative defence market uncertainty. Firms perceiving future home defense markets as less risky due to regulatory oversight are incentivised to reduce their own current profits by self-funding innovation towards future defence requirements and procurement sales to their home states. By incentivising the non-state production of public security goods with its rule-making and relational market power, the EU is a modern regulatory security state, even in the defence domain where it has little political authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insecure connected devices can cause serious threats not just to smart home-owners, but also the underlying infrastructural network. There has been increasing academic and regulatory interest in addressing cybersecurity risks from both the standpoint of IoT vendors and that of end-users. In addition to the current data protection and network security legal frameworks, for example, the UK government has initiated the 'Secure by Design' campaign. While there has been work on how organisations and individuals manage their own cybersecurity risks, it remains unclear to what extent IoT vendors are supporting end-users to perform day-to-day management of such risks, and what is stopping the vendors from improving such support. We interviewed 13 experts in the field of IoT and identified three main categories of barriers to making IoT products useably secure: technical, legal and organisational. In this paper we further discuss the policymaking implications of these findings and make some recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) devices require lower power consumption with higher security, which can be achieved by using lightweight cryptography (LWC) approaches. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) provides a fine-grained access control policy over encrypted data, making it useful in IoT-based cloud storage for allowed data protection. However, the conventional ABE approaches resulted in poor security performance against various attacks in the IoT environment. So, in this paper, the LWC-ABE method is proposed to enhance the security performance against various attacks in the IoT environment. The proposed LWC-ABE contains only multiple trusted authority environments, which is a bottleneck in IoT servers and IoT devices. The proposed LWC-ABE method supports high expressiveness, access policy updates, large attribute domains, and white box traceability properties. The simulation results shows that the proposed LWC-ABE resulted in reduced encryption and decryption times for multi users, different message sizes scenarios as compared to conventional approaches. The numerical outcomes of the proposed method are much better based on performance of encryption and decryption times as 0.000835 and 0.000310 respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently existing credit risk models, e.g., Scoring Card and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), usually have requirements for the capacity of modeling samples. The small sample size may result in the adverse outcomes for the trained models which may neither achieve the expected accuracy nor distinguish risks well. On the other hand, data acquisition can be difficult and restricted due to data protection regulations. In view of the above dilemma, this paper applies Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) to the construction of small and micro enterprises (SMEs) credit risk model, and proposes a novel training method, namely G-XGBoost, based on the XGBoost model. A few batches of real data are selected to train GAN. When the generative network reaches Nash equilibrium, the network is used to generate pseudo data with the same distribution. The pseudo data is then combined with real data to form an amplified sample set. The amplified sample set is used to train XGBoost for credit risk prediction. The feasibility and advantages of the G-XGBoost model are demonstrated by comparing with the XGBoost model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, Europe stands out as the region where data protection regulation is strongest throughout the world. With its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union in 2016 updated its claim for leadership in this policy realm by adopting measures which better meet the challenges of digitalisation. The main interest of this paper is whether three intensely debated emerging norms in the regulation have been driven by the supranational institutions or by single or groups of member states who acted as norm entrepreneurs. Therefore, we trace the decision-making process leading to the GDPR. We conclude that the new regulation provides more support for supranational norm promotion, while we see little evidence for norm entrepreneurship by member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including intellectual property, defamation, and data protection and privacy.

Software piracy has been known as unauthorised reconstruction or illegal redistribution of a licenced software. Detecting pirated from base software is a major concern since pirated software can lead to significant financial losses as well as serious security vulnerabilities. To detect software piracy, we have recently proposed Metamorphic Analysis for Automatic Software Piracy Detection (MetaSPD) with a proof-of-concept evaluation. The core idea of MetaSPD was inspired from metamorphic malware detection due to its similarity of software piracy detection. MetaSPD works primarily based on mining the opcode graph of the base software to extract micro-signatures. Then, it leverages a classifier model to decide whether a given suspicious file is a pirated version of the base software. This paper extends our prior work in several respects. First, we present a retrospective appraisal of the main literature aiming at laying bare the status quo of software piracy detection and arguments on the current problems of the field to motivate our work. We then elaborate on MetaSPD itself and the constituent components. We provide two extensive experiments to evident the effectiveness of MetaSPD. The experiments have been carried out on two different datasets. Each dataset comprises 1300 morphed variants of the respective base software that act as pirated versions of that software. We conducted our experiments using three different classifiers. The paper is also enriched with a detailed discussion of the different properties and concerns of MetaSPD. The results corroborate that an attacker, who is using a pirated version of the given software, can hardly hide illegal usage of the software even by applying superabundant obfuscations to the code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a constructive steganography approach using texture synthesis. With a source texture pattern, we first generate a reference pattern using a point-based texture synthesis. The reference pattern is further extended using a patch-based synthesis algorithm. We crop the extended pattern to generate an intermediate pattern. The reference pattern is then divided into overlapping patches. With a secret key, the reference patches are pseudo-randomly painted onto a blank canvas. To hide secret messages, we identify appropriate patches from the intermediate pattern to represent secret bits, and fulfill the blank regions with these patches using image quilting. The proposed method has a better performance than previous works. As we extend the source pattern to generate more candidate patches, more secret bits can be hidden into the stego image, and the quality of the synthesized image is better. Meanwhile, the proposed method has a capability of resisting a specified attack designed for texture synthesis-based steganography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A big data arena (BDA) is proposed to offer an effective trial-and-error environment for analysis algorithm design and application exploration through the provision of computational resources and intensive data. It is expected to innovate the theories and technologies of, e.g. management analytics, when a huge volume of data are shared in the BDA. How to provide an effective data protection mechanism, however, is one of the most serious challenges that the BDA faces. Motivated to resolve the above issues, this paper analyzes potential security threats that the data in the BDA face at four different processing stages, and puts forward effective access control mechanisms with their design and implementation, to resist the threats from different stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the exponential growth of the Internet has made it easier than ever to carry out plagiarism, it has also made it much easier to detect. This paper gives an overview of the many different methods of detecting web‐based plagiarism which are currently available, assessing practical matters such as cost, functionality and performance. Different types of plagiarism detection services are briefly outlined by broad category. The paper then considers the relative advantages and disadvantages of the different methods, referring to comparative studies where possible. It also draws out some of the more general drawbacks of electronic detection, ranging from practical matters such as technical restrictions, data protection issues, and cost, to the human impact on staff and students alike. It seeks to counterbalance these drawbacks by outlining the many possible benefits of implementing online detection in academic institutions, aside from the obvious saving of time when dealing with large cohorts of students. It argues that if online detection is used in conjunction with the many valuable ‘anti‐plagiarism’ resources and tutorials available on the web, it really can become a positive teaching aid for staff and students alike, rather than a threatening online policing system. The paper concludes with a brief forecast for the future of plagiarism detection, and emphasises that any form of online detection service can only act as a mere diagnostic tool to highlight possible cases of plagiarism, with human judgement always needed to investigate further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "competitive strength" of a company in the digital economy is becoming increasingly more reliant on the data it has at its disposal. As such, personal data has been described as "the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world". The emergence of personal data as "currency" has reinvigorated the development of privacy and consumer protection laws However, competition law has sought to maintain a strict level of separation between what falls within the "scope" of antitrust enforcement and matters deemed "wholly or partially" unrelated to competition. In highlighting the anti-competitive effects created by the vast databases of personal and often sensitive information (Big Data) being acquired by today's dominant internet platforms. this paper seeks to argue that a more refined and comprehensive analysis of the competitive effects of data in merger review is lacking and is required as a matter of urgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the possibilities offered by recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on markets for engaging with market innovation. Although there exist few reflections on how innovation happens in markets, market innovation has not been singularly theorized in STS-inspired market studies. In this paper, we explore the potential analytic utility of different sets of ideas in the field of market studies, such as ‘framing’ [Callon, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics’, inThe Laws of Markets, ed. M. Callon, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57; Callon, M. (2007) ‘An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social’,Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 136–163], ‘productive friction’ [Stark, D. (2009)The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] and ‘bricolage’ [MacKenzie, D. & Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2014) ‘Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance’,Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153–182]. Drawing on our research into the online personal data industry and start-ups developing personal data control products, we put together five sensibilities that we think are of use for broader considerations of market innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines narratives about the right of privacy in the UK. It argues that until relatively recently the dominant narrative was one that associated privacy with celebrity claimants and media defendants. Other narratives, such as those concerned with digital privacy and data protection, did not feature as prominently. But changing technological and social contexts mean that these narratives are now understood to be of immense importance too. This paper explores these narratives against the backdrop of the European Commission's proposals for a ‘right to be forgotten’ (now relabelled a ‘right to erasure’), the subject-matter of this special issue, as well as the 2014Google Spainjudgment. The paper emphasises the importance of forgetting as an aspect of the right to privacy and argues that while the UK legislator and courts have been slow to give effect to erasure remedies, they must now start exploring the bounds of legal possibility in order to meet the challenges of the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]