Konrad Kollnig

Walking across the streets of London, everyone seems to be in a rush. Everyone seems to have a place that they need to be, which is anywhere but in the here and now. We seem to be addicted to getting out of the here and now to some fantastical other place. Escaping the pain of the here and now, also, seems one of the primary drivers. This, curiously, is supported by the psychological literature, which has defined the minimisation of pain as one of our key drivers. Isn’t that a sad take on the human existence?

A bit more than 1.5 months ago, my best friend suddenly passed away, aged 30. He had been ill a long time; it didn’t come unexpected. For him, it was a release from decades of suffering. And yet, I now wonder why society doesn’t prepare us better for the event of death. Why it’s never really talked about. Does it have to be that way?

Death is our constant companion, but we try to push it to the darkest corners of our consciousness. Carpe diem, right? Or rather YOLO, as we used to say before Facebook became itself something of a digital retirement home. In society’s imposed constant struggle for performance, prestige and perfection, it is so easy to lose track of the simple truth — such as the fact that the clock is ticking, for all of us.

This article was written for the Inspired Research magazine of the Depatment of Computer Science of the University of Oxford. URL: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/innovation/inspiredresearch/InspiredResearch–summer23_FINAL_web.pdf

Tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is widely used by app developers to analyse and optimise apps and to show ads. It also is a significant and ubiquitous threat in mobile apps, and often violates data protection and privacy laws.

Previously, our research group led by Prof Sir Nigel Shadbolt analysed 1 million Android apps from the Google Play Store from 2017. We found that about 90% of those apps could share data with Alphabet (the parent company of Google), and 40% with Facebook (now renamed ‘Meta’). The data practices in children’s apps were particularly worrisome, which is why our research group – in response – established a dedicated research strand on Kids Online Anonymity & Lifelong Autonomy (KOALA), led by Dr Jun Zhao. Our findings led to major news coverage back then (including by the Financial Times). This underlines the extent to which those data practices violated individuals’ privacy expectations. Google even issued a public response to our findings, in which they tried to cast doubt over the validity of our (peer-reviewed) methodology.