The key goal of the EWADA project is “to develop and deploy new forms of technical and legal infrastructure, to re-design and promote a more equitable and ethical treatment of individual users and collectives in a sustainable way”. One of the applications of this initiative is to explore how we can better support children and families’ data autonomy. In fact, digital technologies have become so deeply embedded in children’s everyday lives, providing vital access to educational, social, and entertainment experiences and resources. Children of this generation are often the early adopters of emerging services and technologies, having grown up as ‘digital natives’. This has raised concerns and questions about how digital environments including digital apps, systems, services, platforms and more, are affecting children’s well-being, and whether such environments adequately support their developmental needs.

From a human-centred point of view, two lead EWADA researchers (Dr Jun Zhao and [Ge Wang][https://www.tiffanygewang.com]) explored what children and their families recognise as being supportive and ethical, how they would like these components to look like and what supports are needed. Our understandings about this topic have been furthered in this process, as captured by our two CHI’2023 paper:

1. 12 Ways to Empower: Designing for Children’s Digital Autonomy pdf

In this paper, we examine existing HCI literature discussing definitions and designs for children’s digital autonomy. Our aim is to contribute an understanding of how digital autonomy for children is positioned in the current HCI community, and to identify how specific kinds of designs have been explored to support digital autonomy development in children. To do so, we conducted a systematic review of the use of autonomy-supportive design mechanisms in HCI research, with the goal of laying out its design space, specifically answering two research questions as follows: RQ1 - How does the HCI literature conceptualise digital autonomy for children? RQ2 - What autonomy-supportive design mechanisms have been explored in apps and systems for children? Our findings provide a critical understanding of current support for children’s digital autonomy in HCI. We highlight the importance of considering children’s digital autonomy from multi-perspectives, and suggest critical factors and gaps to be considered for future more autonomy-supportive designs.

2.”Treat me as your friend, not a number in your database’’: Co-designing with Children to Cope with Datafication Online pdf

Datafication refers to the practices through which children’s online actions are pervasively recorded, tracked, aggregated, analysed, and exploited by online services in ways including behavioural engineering and monetisation. Previous research has shown that not only do children care significantly about various aspects of datafication, but they demand a chance to take action. Through 10 co-design sessions with 53 children, we examined how children in the UK want to be supported to cope with the datafication practices. Our findings provide insights for creating age-appropriate support for children’s algorithmic literacy development, highlighting and unpacking the importance of no one-size-fitting-all designs to support children’s coping with datafication. We contribute a first understanding of how children aged 7–14 would like to be supported with datafication and what future data-driven digital experiences should be like for them, who demand a shift of the current data ecosystem towards a more humane-by-design and autonomy-supportive future.

Please follow the above links for further reading and contact the authors if you wish for further information.

Ethical Web and Data Architectures – they give our project its name, but what precisely makes a technical artefact like a web or data architecture, ethical? This is an excellent question and one we receive often.

This is also a question for which the existing web provides some good examples. Wikipedia seems to miraculously negotiate consensus across millions of voices to deliver truth in a mis-and-disinformation-ridden web. The SOLID project promises to enable a new age of web interoperability and personal data control through new protocols. Data trusts, collaboratives, and cooperatives put forward a diverse vision for collective governance in their own respective, brighter, data futures (Brandusescu, Ana and van Geus, Jonathan 2020).

These proposals all latently embody values of fairness or autonomy, but are dotted with intricate voting mechanisms, technical implementations, and esoteric concepts for what the future technologies might look like. Seldom are these designs for data futures relatable to, nor designed by the data subjects who they aim to benefit. For those who will inevitably experience these data futures, design questions are not focused on the lightning rod terms of data governance like quadratic voting, homomorphic encryption, or ephemeral services. They are more along the lines of how do I stay safe, make more money, or connect with community with the help of my data, rather than in spite of it (Zhang et al. 2022)? Though Human Computer Interaction (HCI) values user participation in design, existing research has steered clear of allowing users to participate in data stewardship, labelling data architectures and protocols as too technically complex for the data literacy of the average web user, or simply a matter of implementation details (Bødker and Kyng 2018). We see these architectures differently. They are the product of the socio-technical systems and relations which they create, support, or automate and can themselves be as (un)ethical as those systems too.

In a new paper accepted to this year’s ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI23), EWADA researchers challenged this assumption. The paper, led by EWADA PhD student Jake Stein with help from EWADA summer intern Vid Mikucionis, developed new methods to elicit what data architectures should embody based on the direct input of data subjects themselves. In the paper, the EWADA team engaged with gig workers driving and riding with platforms like Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo, whose algorithmic management practices makes workers particularly vulnerable to exploitative information asymmetries. The research provides meaningful strides bridging the gap between novel data infrastructures and the practical everyday challenges created by data stewardship. The EWADA team puts forward a new methodology that retools canonical HCI methods from their typical domain of interface and interaction design to address the fundamentally contingent and socially-bound dynamics of data architecture building.

Contrary to prevailing thinking, the team found data subjects of varying data literacy levels were excited to participate in collective data stewardship. In simulated data stewardship tasks, the participants were able to first internalise the affordances of separate data structures, then provide meaningful input into the design of collective data infrastructures based on their reflection. In our methodology, the EWADA team highlighted the great potential of using existing legal tools including Data Subject Access Requests to augment commonly used participatory design tools like online whiteboards.

Beyond demonstrating new means for participatory data architecture design, the participants expressed important considerations that should be included in designs for collectively governed data architectures. These included the need for dispute, discussion, correction and contextualization mechanisms, granular permissions affordances, and community-facing analytics portals. Participants also contributed a wide variety of ideas about which stakeholders should participate in new data institutions and their respective roles from labour unions and governments, to autonomous collectives, affinity groups based on ethnicity and gender identity, and online communities. The study concludes by providing two points of reflexive consideration. It questions researchers’ role in gig economies, questioning how researchers can intervene to expose information asymmetries without replicating gig-like work conditions and providing valuable information to workers. Finally, it calls for future research to continue developing participatory design methods suitable for data data architecture design pointing to the danger for architectures to repeat patterns they aim to resist.

• BØdker, Susanne, and Morten Kyng. 2018. ‘Participatory Design That Matters—Facing the Big Issues’. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 25(1):1–31. doi: 10.1145/3152421.

• Brandusescu, Ana and van Geus, Jonathan. 2020. Shifting Power through Data Governance. Mozilla Data Futures Lab.

• Zhang, Angie, Alexander Boltz, Chun Wei Wang, and Min Kyung Lee. 2022. ‘Algorithmic Management Reimagined For Workers and By Workers: Centering Worker Well-Being in Gig Work’. Pp. 1–20 in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New Orleans LA USA: ACM.

On 8 December, the EWADA team members, Jun, Rui and Hunar, represented the project team on the remote gathering of Solid World, and shared with the Solid community some of our latest developments.

Solid World is a monthly online event that provides an opportunity for the community to meet others who are also working on Solid. The December event started with an introduction from Tim and Pierrer-Antoine about the formation of a W3C working group for Solid, and then followed by presentations by us about SolidFlix and Solid Calendar, and another presentation from Jackson Morgan about LDO.

Both Hunar and Rui provided a short presentation about SolidFlix and Solid Calendar respectively, which included a short screencast showing how the current implementation works, see videos linked below. In the presentation of SolidFlix, Hunar gave a nice summary of the architectural design of our application and its current ability of enabling social sharing of movies and performing simple movie recommendations based on what friends have watched/liked. In the presentation of Solid Calendar, Rui showed how the application can enable users to sync their existing calendars (such as Google Calendar and iCal) with their Solid pods, and thus make it easier for them to schedule meetings using this Solid-based application with friends, who may rely on different calendar systems. The application improves an existing application from Ghent University, Knoodle, with a more usable user interface and a refactoring of the original architectural design, which replaces the dependency of a custom-built Solid server with more modularised components.

The presentations were well received by the >60 attendees at the meeting and we received interesting questions including: whether we have performed any UX evaluations with our prototypes yet and how users reacted to it, whether SolidFlix is compatible with Media Kraken, and how we see the proposed architectural design of Solid Calendar could work with existing Solid designs.

To follow up, our next steps for the SolidFlix project include continuing internal user testing to improve the robustness of the initial log-in (onboard) process, and exploring a privacy-preserving movie recommendation. For the Solid Calendar project, we would also like to carry out further internal testing, deploy the new calendar import service (aka the orchestrator service) for broader access within Oxford, and explore the interoperability of our proposed architectural design with the rest of Solid stacks.

Below are links to our presentations and demo pages:

• Presentation of SolidFlix Google slides
• Presentation of Solid Calendar, including the screencast
• Demo page for SolidFlix - WebID required
• Demo page for Solid Calendar - WebID and access to a Google Calendar required

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us via the contact page if you would like to know more about the work.

A huge amount and range of education data is routinely collected in UK state schools (Persson, 2020). These data can be collected and processed at schools for a variety of purposes. Sometimes, schools are collecting these data under their obligation to the Department for Education (DfE); other times, they need to process children’s data as part of teaching, assessment, administrative and safeguarding (DFC, 2021b). Finally, schools are increasingly contracting external EdTech companies to process children’s data to enhance their learning and education opportunities.

While schools are expected to be the primary duty bearers of children’s best interests, their duties are compounded by the complexity of legislation in the education sector and the extreme challenge of carrying out compliance validation. To shed lights upon this challeging situation, the Digital Future Commissions and 5Rights Foundations called for a timely peer-reviewed essay collection, namely Education Data Futures, which was launched on 21 November 2022.

Researchers from the EWADA project contributed our thoughts of a technical alternative to the current learning data management and governance paradigm for UK state schools. Our proposal is based on the new wave of decentralised paradigms for data sharing and ownership. This decentralised data governance is anticipated to expand individual data subjects’ ability to access data and establish data autonomy. A data trust is one such data governance model, which provides a promising response to schools’ need for an independent and trustworthy body of experts who can make critical decisions about who has access to data and under what conditions.

A data trust as ‘a legal structure that provides independent stewardship of data’, including deciding who has access to data, under what conditions and to whose benefit (Open Data Institute, 2019). It is different from other data governance structures because it represents ‘a legal relationship where a trustee stewards data rights in the sole interests of a beneficiary or a group of beneficiaries’ (van Geuns & Brandusescu, 2020). Instead of taking a grassroots governance model (such as a data commons), the trustees can be the decision-makers regarding who has access, under what conditions and to whose benefit, and they take on a legally binding responsibility for data stewardship (Open Data Institute, 2019).

It has been exciting to see some practical developments of data trusts recently, built on extensive theoretical landscaping. However, developing data trusts is a complex task and requires a strong commitment from data holders and the users’ community. Furthermore, existing legal frameworks are not necessarily ready to support all the data stewardship and legal binding responsibilities designed for a data trust. The essay runs through a case study about personalised learning at school to demonstrate what a data trust model may provide.

As shown in the figure below, a data trust can act as an intermediary for schools, making decisions about what education data can be accessed by a third party, investigating the purposes of data access, and assessing how they may be aligned with students’ best interests. It provides a promising direction for mitigating the challenges that schools face regarding data safeguarding and compliance checking.

However, developing such a data trust is not without challenges. The essay concludes by discussing open social, legal and technological challenges to be considered, calling for a pilot model of data trusts in the educational technology (EdTech) sector, for which the technologies of the EWADA project could notable contributions to.

Please follow the link for further reading about the essay pdf and the essay collection.

Summer 2022 is our second year of running a very successful internship programme. We are fortunate to have secured four internships with excellent candidates, each adding tremendous contributions to EWADA’s exploration of creating ethical web applications for the future with Solid. This summer has been full of excitement and inspiration. This report summarises the four projects carried out and how they contribute to the EWADA vision.

Overview of the projects

The key goal of the EWADA project is “to develop and deploy new forms of technical and legal infrastructure, to re-design and promote a more equitable and ethical treatment of individual users and collectives in a sustainable way”. In the first year, our focus is to deliver a suit of case study applications so that we could gain a deeper understanding of the components that are needed for building the ethical, decentralised architecture. For this, we need to understand both from a user’s point of view and a practical and technical point of view what these components should look like.

From a human-centred point of view, we need to understand what users recognise as being ethical, how they would like these components to look like and what supports are needed. For the engineers and researchers, we need to understand what technical are needed and how they could be brought together.

We have gained some knowledge about these challenges through our ongoing research with children (regarding datafication and data autonomy) and our building of a solid-media application. This summer, we aim to achieve further understandings through the following projects:

• The Gigworker project: by interacting with gig workers to explore what data autonomy barriers that workers are facing with existing online platforms and what support they need
• The Solid Calendar project: by extending existing Solid architecture’s capability of interoperating with existing data sources, s uch as various calendar formats from existing providers
• The SolidFlix project: by benchmarking performance of Solid-based applications and exploring ethical movie recommendation opportunities
• The Multi-Party Computation (MPC) project: by extending existing Solid-like decentralised systems with the necessary privacy-preserving computation capabilities.

As shown in the outline figure below, these projects provide a rich opportunity to explore various technical and social components for realising our vision of an ethical architecture:

1. Supporting collective users’ values: Existing solid-based applications have largely been focusing on supporting individual users to explore and manage their own data using Solid, in order to bootstrap their autonomy with their data. However, the ‘GigWorker’ project aims to explore how Solid can support collective values from individuals’ autonomy, for example for workers to argue for more fair salary rate or to create peer support, reduce isolations and manage their collective well-beings. For this, we are interested to examine what kind of collective values would be useful for workers, and what concerns and needs they may have.

2. Supporting a richer decentralised web architecture: Access control is fundamental to Solid data storage. However, several additional components may be useful in addition to the vanilla Solid. This includes: 1) a privacy-preservation computation component, so that we could apply data aggregations or AI-based computations to individual’s data without compromising their data privacy and security; 2) an ethical AI computation component, so that personalisation computations will not continue to introduce filter bubbles, biased recommendations or exploitations; and 3) a data adapter/orchestrator component, so that Solid applications can interoperate with existing data sources or formats, without forcing users to abandon their existing digital habits.

Fig 1. EWADA summer projects contribute to new ethcial app components (a Data Orchestrator, an ethical AI recommender and a privacy computation component), and three new ethical (social) web applications, including a social calendar, an ethical platform for gigworkers and a platform for social moving sharing.

Outcomes and next steps

Our summer projects made great strides in exploring these social and technical components. From the GigWorker study, we have identified the plurality of needs from the workers and we are continuing the work by creating a prototype that will cater for workers’ diversity needs. We generated encouraging early results for integrating a privacy-preserving computation components with the Solid architecture, and we aim to extend this work by deploying this integration in actual ethical applications. We completed the prototyping of the data orchestrator design and are hoping to present this design to the Solid community in the near future. In the process of adding ethical recommendations to the SoliFlix project, we worked extensively to explore performance optimisations and we are also hoping to present this result to the Solid community soon.

Fig 2 illustrates our key next steps:

• From in principle to in practice: several components mentioned above have not yet been fully integrated into one reference implementation, which will present an exciting starting point for developing practical application scenarios such as for gig workers or ethical recommendation systems for children.
• From in principle to in the wild: we will also focus on sharing all the design and development experiences with the wider Solid and open-source communities, to ensure interoperability and bootstrap the uptake of our proposed solutions.
• Furthermore, we will consolidate some of the components we started and make investigation of various social-technical components, based on this excellent technical ground we have developed so far, including how we may provide supports for users to select Solid pod providers or ethical app components that they can trust, what kind of algorithmic transparency will be needed by users in the newly decentralised and ethical web applications, what new data protection regulations, governance and auditing are needed, and etc.

We are hoping the successful summer internship will continue its tradition next year as it has been exciting to see how the internships have provided an effective way for us to define miniature tasks that make critical contributions to the project overall, as well as to transfer our frontier understandings about the key of creating web decentralisations to our amazing interns, Vid, Zimeng, Hunar and Adrien! Thank you, and wish you all the best of luck!

Fig 2. EWADA's focus post-summer internships: deployment and testing of new applications, and enhancement of core ethical computing components.

We are really excited to welcome our new full-time EWADA DPhil joining the project - Zhilin Zhang.

Zhilin received his B.S. and M.S., both in Computer Science, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In EWADA, Zhilin will study HCI to better understand and improve human interactions with AI and other complex algorithmic systems. I design and build computing systems to positively support users’ online behaviors and interactions in a scalable and accessible way.

Zhilin is fully-funded by the prestigious Oxford Computer Science Departmental Studentship and co-supervised by Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Dr Jun Zhao.

We are very excited to announce 3 summer internships in 2022!!!

Please come to join us if you want to create an AUTONOMOUS Web with a group of world-leading computer scientists!

Detailed job description

You will be working with researchers from [Oxford HCC (http://hcc.cs.ox.ac.uk))] to develop new web applications that enable web users to take back the control of their personal online data and decide how an application may make use of their data in a privacy-preserving way.

You will be working with the Solid (Social Linked Data) architecture from MIT [1], which is a standards-based approach that provides practical solutions to web decentralisation and empowers people to take back control of their data and regain their self-autonomy.

Background of the project

You will be working as part of the Oxford Martin School programme EWADA (Ethical Web and Data Infrastructure in the Age of AI)[2] Project, which is an ambitious 3-year programme that aims to reform the concentration of power on the Web by developing and deploying new forms of technical and legal infrastructure. The project is led by Prof. Sir. Nigel Shadbolt and Prof. Sir. Tim Berner-Lee and aims to investigate novel re-decentralisation architectures and develop critical privacy-preserving AI methods to re-establish citizens’ self-autonomy on the Web.

Selection criteria

Ideally, you are expected to have experience with full-stack web development and be interested and willing to learn about EWADA research and Solid ecosystems (in Javascript or Python). Moreover, you will need to be able to work well with others, as these roles will be highly collaborative.

We have a range of application choices for this year’s summer internship, including:

• Creating a solid-based decentralise social media platform so that we do not have to be confined by existing proprietary solutions
• Creating a solid-based worker platform that enables gig workers (such as Amazon workers or Uber drivers) to take better control of their data
• Implementing a privacy-preserving computational protocol for users to share their data in a solid-based decentralised architecture

Application

The post is expected to be full-time (36.5 hours) for 12 weeks, starting mid-July 2022 and ending in September 2022, £12.74-14.29 (Grade 3.8-4.7) per hour, depending on experience. If you are a student holding a Tier 4 visa, then you are permitted to work full-time for 8 weeks and 4 weeks part-time (max 20 hrs per week).

The post does not have to be based in Oxford but will be subject to the right to work in the UK. We CAN NOT sponsor visa applications due to the short duration of the project.

Applications should be submitted to Dr Jun Zhao (jun.zhao@cs.ox.ac.uk), including a 2-page resume, an indication of the application of interest, and a short paragraph of background and interests.

The closing date for applications is 12 noon on Friday, 1 July 2022. Candidates will be shortlisted and invited for an interview by 8 July.

Selection criteria

Essential

• The ability to communicate information clearly, including technical content
• The ability and desire to learn about Solid-related research, to quickly acquire domain expertise needed for effectively developing new web applications
• The ability and desire to work with research staff to elicit information about how information should be organised
• Substantial experience developing web-based applications
• The ability to effectively manage time, to complete projects efficiently
• The ability to work independently and think creatively

Desirable

• Expertise with base Web platform languages & technologies including HTML, CSS and Javascript
• Expertise with Python and Linux-based Operating Systems
• Graphic and interaction design experience and expertise

On 26-27 March, EWADA researchers attended the Venice Colloquium 2022, co-organised by Sir Nigel Shadbolt, the Royal Society and Goodenough College. The colloqium assembled researchers from Oxford and from Goodenough working in AI, philosophy, legal regulation and public policy to consider how best the development of AI might be framed and regulated across different governments and societies. The Colloquium hopes to sponsor genuine cross-disciplinary exchange between different academic communities.

Oxford researchers contributed a series of talks about AI for children, Privacy and Data Protection in an age of AI, AI regulation for the use of social media, as well as Ethical Data Architectures. A series of essays are expected to be published later this year, reporting all detailed discussions taking place in the Colloquium. We very much look forward to a productive collaboration ahead!

We are really excited to welcome two new full-time EWADA team members on board:

• Dr Naman Noel, previously affiliated with ETH Zurich
• Rui Zhao, a final PhD student from University of Edinburgh

Their further details can be found in our team page.

We cannot wait to further our exploration of the open and privacy-preserving architecture building with these two new talents!

Researchers from Oxford Human Centred Computing Research Group (of which EWADA is part of) provided a response to the public consultation on mobile ecosystems by the Competition and Markets Authority.

Mobile ecosystems serve as an important part of our everyday lives, mediating social, political and market interactions. The ever increasing importance and ubiquity of mobile devices puts great power into the hands of those companies that make the key design decisions affecting mobile ecosystems. Decisions that might sometimes go against the interests of consumers. This is why we welcome the opportunity to respond to the ongoing investigation of the CMA into mobile ecosystems. Oxford HCC/EWADA researchers have been studying the data flows and power relations in the mobile ecosystem for many years, and thus welcome the opportunity to respond to the ongoing investigation of the CMA into mobile ecosystems.

The major themes of our response cover the following topics:

• Ensure that app developers are not (implicitly or explicitly) nudged into violating basic provisions of UK data protection law, particularly the need to seek consent before engaging in third-party tracking. This could include standards for regulatory conformance (e.g. clarifying the responsibility of those companies developing tracking technologies, and requiring them to provide simple and compliant implementation guidance to app developers), and should ultimately aim to build a mobile ecosystem that facilitates compliance by default (see Section 1.1.1).
• Empower researchers to conduct app research, by enabling ways in which researchers can more easily analyse encrypted iOS apps, download apps at scale, and analyse encrypted network traffic of apps on Android (see Sections 1.2.1–1.2.2).
• Enable researchers to analyse concerns around underlying technologies of the mobile ecosystem, including the use of data relating to individuals and other advertising companies in Apple’s SKAdNetwork (see Section 1.4.3). Lower barriers to entry and innovation. Encourage the use of cross-platform technologies in app development (such as open web technologies), ensure that Windows and Linux users can develop apps for iOS (currently only macOS users), and lower the barrier to entry into the App Store (currently an annual 99 USD fee applies) (see Section 2.1).
• Ensure that gatekeepers do not self-preference, particularly with regards to ad attribution or in the definition of tracking in the Apple ecosystem, and the distribution of adblocking technologies on Android and in Google Chrome (see Sections 1.4.2–1.4.3 and 2.1). Scrutinise Google’s current ban of in-app tracking blockers (see Section 2.1), including Disconnect.me, to give consumers more choice over how apps use their data and to tackle widespread infringements of data protection law (particularly the need to seek user consent prior to tracking, as well as proportionality, data minimisation and purpose limitation) within apps.
• Consider requiring smartphone OS’s and app store operators to enable third-party mobile app extension functionality to spur innovation in mobile apps and reduce harms within them, similar to the approach taken with extensions in desktop browsers and mobile Safari starting with iOS 15, while ensuring safety of consumers using such extensions through the existing app store review processes (see Section 2.2).
• Ensure that the review of apps on the app stores and the policies underlying this process are fair and transparent, for example through regular mandatory disclosures about this enforcement (including with regards to privacy and data protection). Such disclosures would be a minimally invasive but realistic intervention, and have been suggested by a variety of researchers from different backgrounds. See Section 3.1 for more details.
• Consider separating key functions within the governance of mobile ecosystems to reduce conflicts of interests, such as privacy management to avoid self-preferencing as regards data collection and protect consumers against excesses and monopolisation of such data collection, and promoting more research into this area (see Section 3.2).

Read our full responses here