UCL’s Faculty of Laws is offering a fully funded 3-year Home/Overseas PhD studentship in the area of information technology law and policy, focussing on regulating platform infrastructures in the Global South.
The sensing ability of intimate devices such as smartphones is rapidly increasing, involving technologies such as Bluetooth (used in contact tracing), Ultra-Wide Band (used for Apple’s ‘AirTags’) and LoRa (used for Amazon’s Ring). During COVID-19, there were strong desires to use these to support granular, rapid, public health interventions for collective benefit. Yet the societal, technical and legal considerations concerning who gets to use, alter, assemble and dismantle such platform sensing infrastructures are complex. They involve private companies controlling hardware, operating systems, cloud services and software distribution; standard-setting bodies; technical protocols and possibilities; and legislative efforts. Some have seen the current regime as foreclosing abuses of state surveillance and population control; others see the practical inability of states to control infrastructures built and maintained by these firms as impinging on varying notions of ‘digital sovereignty’. Either way, all these above activities of regulation and governance have potential extraterritorial and transnational implications, creating a challenging landscape for a coherent and balanced global regime.
Policy discussions however centre predominantly on a few countries in the Global North. This is problematic, as attempts to rebalance legitimate decision-making power around the use and management of such infrastructures can hardly be said to do so if that rebalancing occurs solely within rich countries.
Consequently, UCL Laws invites applicants to work on a funded PhD in this area, supervised by Dr Michael Veale (Lecturer in Digital Rights and Regulation), to create frameworks and insights to inform emerging policy debates. The research will be expected to address one or more of the following questions, and through doing so, dialogue with and contribute to the broader ‘Real Time Epidemiology’ project.
· Which legal mechanisms are available to governments to intervene in platform sensing infrastructures?
· What are the limits of these mechanisms? How do the limits differ between countries, and why? What are the perceptions and experiences of governance actors in the Global South as to differences in these capabilities?
· What are the current trends in or proposals for the regulation of platform sensing infrastructures, and how might these affect the locus of decision-making around the world?
· What might more globally balanced governance of platform sensing infrastructures look like? Through which legal mechanisms might it come about?
This studentship is part of the ‘Real Time Epidemiology’ project (UCL investigator Dr Michael Veale, partners EPFL, ETH Zürich, TU Delft, 3db Technologies) funded by the Fondation Botnar.
Applicants with prior qualifications and/or experience in technology policy, rather than solely in law, are welcome to apply for this position. UCL aims to acknowledge, understand, and tackle structural inequities and unjust social power imbalances that affect our communities across the institution. We very strongly encourage applicants from backgrounds that are underrepresented in academia, and aim to create a research environment that tackles relative, typically unspoken and unacknowledged privilege.
Further details and a longer description of the position and application process are available on the UCL Laws website. Queries about the vacancy should be sent to m.veale[at]ucl.ac.uk; queries about the application process to phd-law[at]ucl.ac.uk.
Please find full information on how to apply here http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/files/UCLLawsPhD.pdf
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