Sociotechs

Digital identity, meaning the conversion of human identities into digital data, is often hailed as a route to benefits from the public and private sectors. At the same time, a different reality confronts this orthodoxy: vast empirical evidence exists on the harmful outcomes of digital identity, ranging from exclusion of entitled individuals from essential services to perilous forms

The recent Olympic Games and European Football Championship have highlighted once again the importance, and controversiality, of technologies associated with referee decisions. A Video Assistant Referee, or VAR, is tasked with assisting the referee concerning dubious situations in a sports game. While VAR has become part and parcel of the experience of multiple sports, including fo

The ongoing war on Gaza, one of the deadliest military assaults in history, has been accompanied by extreme applications of digital technologies to warfare. This feeds into the many layers of cybercontrol to which Palestine, a land under military and settler occupation, has long been subjected. Today we are joined by Fabio Cristiano to explore data violence in the ongoing Israeli a

The foundational elements of EU migration policies and security technologies started to take a turn in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, accelerating the research and use of traditional military and war technologies such as drones in civilian border management. In this episode, we explore the role of drones in border studies, the evolving landscape of EU border t

Health data governance should ensure protection for individuals' health data against violations, while enabling the smooth functioning of healthcare systems. Doing so involves a complex set of stakeholders, opening multiple questions which directly affect the way our health data are collected, stored and managed. Today we sit with Dragana Paparova to unpack such questions, lear

The narrative of digital deception pervades the discourse on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), opening important questions on the validity and verifiability of the information we come across daily. In this landscape, generative AI is now being extensively used to create engaging bots on social media which poses several threats to the fabric of trust and safety we as users ex

Humanitarian aid has undergone significant transformations in recent years, driven in part by the increasing integration of technology and the growing influence of private partners. Such a development not just changes who the actors are also, the mindset and response these actors bring for such an important ecosystem. We sit with Giulio Coppi to understand the principles of humanit

The notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for social good is being actively pushed as a route to involve private tech vendors in the pursuit of targets ascribing to the Sustainable Development Goals. With our guest Gianluca Iazzolino, we discuss the implications of the "AI for Social Good" (AI4SG) logic for intended providers and beneficiaries, with a focus on Africa. Fr

At a time when machines undertake practices previously delegated to human expertise, questions of skill erosion become prominent. Our guests Esko Penttinen and Joona Ruissalo illuminate the intersections of automation and skill erosion, which denotes a situation of decline in people's ability to manage tasks with the same effectiveness as before. With rich empirics from the a

Data reuse is crucial to making existing datasets accessible across users, systems and organisations. As we discuss today with Elena Parmiggiani, many questions surround data reuse: how can data be managed, curated and prepared to achieve cross-contextual reusability? How does this affect social and political responsibility across countries, regions and sites of data production? El