Digital technologies and security laws are shaping the daily lives of millions of people. Yet careless use or, worse, misuse has the potential to restrict fundamental rights, fail to curb online hate and abuse to an adequate extent, or engender new technological risks. Professor Matthew Smith, a computer scientist at the University of Bonn, is to receive a much-sought-after Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to devise solutions to these ethical and technological conflicts. The EU will be funding his project to the tune of some €2.5 million over the next five years.
From government surveillance and online abuse to content moderation and age checks for websites, many of the debates surrounding privacy and digital security seem impossible to resolve. “You often have legitimate aims that are in conflict with one another,” explains Professor Matthew Smith from the University of Bonn’s Institute for Computer Science and the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE). “For example, when privacy and fundamental rights come up against child protection or public safety.”
In his EthicoTech project, which is being funded by the ERC, Smith will now be working with his team to develop a new research method to gain a better understanding of these entrenched technological conflicts in IT security, privacy and data protection and come up with potential solutions. To this end, he is involving different groups in the inner workings of his research process, from computer scientists, law enforcement officers and policymakers through to victims, parents, young people and platform operators. “We’re investigating whether the conflicts are really ethical in nature, whether they’re caused by technological factors or whether it’s a bit of both.”
He wants to use his research to formulate better technological or legislative requirements in areas such as government surveillance, online abuse and content monitoring. “Possible outcomes could be requirements for age checks that comply with privacy legislation, better ways to combat online harassment or a more solid basis for making decisions about security and data protection law.”
This kind of research would not have been possible without the ERC funding. “The grant will enable me to undertake long-term, methodologically demanding research involving repeat studies, hard-to-reach groups of stakeholders, monetary incentives for participants and technical research infrastructure,” Matthew Smith says, underlining the importance of the funding. “Without this financial support, it would be virtually impossible to subject complex and controversial debates like these to a systematic investigation lasting several years and involving different social groups.”
About Matthew Smith
Professor Matthew Smith has been Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn since 2013. He also heads up the Usable Security and Privacy department at the FKIE and works as a principal investigator at the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the Centre for Cyber Trust (an initiative of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Bonn) and the CASA Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr University Bochum.
Smith’s work straddles the boundaries between technical IT security and behavioral research. He is interested in questions such as how systems need to be designed so that developers and users present attackers with fewer weak points to target and how potential “doorways” for hackers can be identified as early as during the coding stage. Smith, who helped to set up the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in Cyber Security at the University of Bonn, is also supporting the transfer of his research findings into teaching and practice.
Media contact:
Prof. Dr. Matthew Smith
Institute for Computer Science
University of Bonn
Phone: +49 228 73-60745
Email: smith(at)cs.uni-bonn.de
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