Kieron O’Hara is an associate professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He has had a central involvement in the development of the discipline of Web Science. He is the author of several books, including: ‘Plato and the Internet’ (2002); ‘Trust: From Socrates to Spin’ (2004); ‘inequality.com: Power, Poverty and the Digital Divide’ (2006, with David Stevens); and ‘The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy As We Know It’ (2008, with Nigel Shadbolt), as well as ‘A Framework for Web Science’ (2006, with Tim Berners-Lee et al). He has also written extensively on British politics and political theory, and is a research fellow for the Centre for Policy Studies, and an associate fellow of Bright Blue. His latest book is ‘The Theory and Practice of Social Machines’ (2019, with Nigel Shadbolt, David De Roure and Wendy Hall), and his latest edited collection is ‘Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency’ (2020, edited with Mireille Hildebrandt). He chaired the transparency sector panel for crime and criminal justice for the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office from 2011-15. His report on privacy in the context of the UK government’s transparency programme, ‘Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens’, was published in September 2011. He is one of the leads for the UKAN network of anonymisation professionals. He is the editor of Foundations and Trends in Web Science. 

Areas of Interest 

Privacy, trust, digital modernity, ethics, Web Science, anonymisation, politics of data