LAWTECH COLLIDER: USER CONTENT?

User Content? invites us to consider what happens to our data when we use online apps, services and devices. What are the consequences of ticking ‘I Agree’ to the T&Cs of apps or web services? Are we content with the power imbalance between us as individual data subjects and giant corporate data users? Do we wish to be content, or subjects?

The creative works here have been created specifically to respond to legal-tech scholarship about two aspects of data protection:

Surveillance of fertility and pregnancy data
Data sharing through social media

Unwittingly or knowingly, we may tick the box to agree to privacy policies because we want to use the apps and web services, often for free. Yet we are not always aware of the data collected about us or how they are used.

The works in User Content? are the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration at Ulster University between creative practice, law and technology. Informed by legal scholarship and research, the creative practitioners have produced their interpretation of these aspects of our digital lives.

This is the first co-creation of LawTech Collider, a project of the Legal Innovation Centre, Ulster University, which promotes creative practice to explore the ability and strength of the law to respond to digital technology for society’s good.