NCRM Placement Fellowship: Digital Identity

Placement organisation: Alan Turing Institute
Researcher: Duncan Hodges, Cranfield University
Placement duration: April 2018 - April 2019

Over the last 2 decades we have seen a massive increase in the use of digital services as part of our daily lives, we now truly use the internet to work, rest and play. We not only use online spaces to engage and play with friends and consume media, we also use online spaces to bank, shop and engage with civil and government services. Across all of these spaces we expose parts of our online identity, these form a digital trail of our online activity, this trail is often immutable and permanent.

Duncan’s research considers the effect of the aggregation of these small projections of identity both in our online lives and those that bridge into our offline lives. This aggregation effect is contextualised by a variety of different case-studies of ‘everyday’ activities we all perform. Ways to reduce the effect of these inferred and aggregated identities can then be explored, particularly the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies. One particularly interesting topic is how the effectiveness of these mitigation strategies varies between different populations or societal groups.

Duncan is a lecturer in the Information Operations Group within the Centre for Electronic Warfare, Information and Cyber at Cranfield University. His research is focussed on a variety of cyber security topics particularly what can be learnt from the side-effects that result from how humans interact with technology.