“Gender and IoT” Research Featured in the E&T Magazine

By Dr Leonie Tanczer
PETRAS Research Associate

The innovative “Gender and IoT” (G-IoT) research project was featured in the July issue of the Engineering & Technology (E&T) Magazine. The latter is the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) award-winning monthly magazine.

The article “IoT devices and smart domestic abuse: who has the controls?” is part of the outlet’s special issue on “Women in Engineering”. It highlighted UCL’s socio-technical research efforts to uncover the potential misuse of emerging technologies in instances of domestic violence and abuse.

Over the last six months, Dr Leonie Tanczer together with Dr Simon Parkin, Dr Trupti Patel, and Professor George Danezis, conducted a cutting-edge feasibility study that run in collaboration with the PETRAS IoT Hub, the London VAWG Consortium, and Privacy International. The article sheds light on some of their research findings and reveals the difficulty of providing technical support and guidance for groups most vulnerable to such pervasive forms of abuse.

Dr Leonie Tanczer, the Principal Investigator of the project and PDRA for PETRAS Standards, Governance and Policy Stream, is delighted to see this pressing issue being covered in an engineering outlet. She sees the article is a timely contribution as first documented cases of IoT-facilitated tech-abuses emerge.

The team hopes that the article will raise awareness within the communities that develop, design and maintain IoT devices and systems and will lead to larger societal debates about the privacy and security implications of cyber-physical systems.