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Our October 2024 academic spotlight features Dr Michael Veale, Associate Professor in digital rights and regulation and Vice-Dean (Education Innovation) at the UCL Faculty of Laws
Tell us a bit about yourself
I'm Michael Veale, and I'm an Associate Professor in Digital Rights and Regulation at the Faculty of Laws at UCL. Although I joined Laws in 2019, I've been at UCL for a while longer than that, in large part because I completed my PhD in the Faculty of Engineering. I believe I'm the only person to have made that exact leap, while it's a very different environment, my wonderful colleagues here made me feel right at home. We have something really great going on. I'm also Vice-Dean (Education Innovation), which means I'm fortunate enough to have on my plate little issues like the impact of AI on assessment and the challenges it poses to the way we teach.
What are your research interests?
My research is at the intersection of law, technology, political economy, and public policy. Sometimes I publish in computer science, sometimes in law, and sometimes in regulation. It's a diverse mix, and I appreciate that. I'm interested in how examining technologies through different methodological lenses - considering their use by real actors, entities, businesses, and public organizations - helps us understand what law should, could, and might be as we strive to design a future rather than simply following some glowing technological light we're told is 'better'. In this area, I focus on topics such as encryption, online tracking and advertising, and state surveillance. My PhD was in the governance of machine learning, and I've been delving deeper into that field since AI seemingly burst onto the covers of every newspaper and into every policy discussion. It can be overwhelming to keep up with all these topics, but one of the most enjoyable aspects is the community of people at this intersection. They are friendly, non-hierarchical, and just fun to be around. There's little more fun than writing about things that fascinate you with friends based around the world.
Tell us about some of your recent work on European issues
European issues frequently arise because European law has significantly influenced technology for quite some time. Recently, there has been a surge of regulation surrounding technology, and I have been actively involved in shaping these debates, including amendments, initial framing, and the drafting and discussion of regulatory guidance. This goes back to my early work between a MSc and a PhD as a Blue Book trainee in a unit between DG CONNECT and DG SANCO/SANTE in the European Commission, spanning health and technology and ageing. It both sparked intrigue for European policy, and also told me that that civil service wasn't freeing enough for me.
My work around European law has focused on various new regimes that have emerged since the mid-2010s, particularly reforms to data protection law, which have manifested in interesting ways in the courts. Much of my work involves the intersection of data protection law, especially the GDPR, with new technologies and emerging practices, such as complex chains of automated decision-making, explanations of machine learning systems, online tracking, and access to data in encrypted contexts. I really enjoy seeing my work have impact, so I make sure it gets out there – a paper I co-wrote was cited by one of the European Court of Justice's Advocates General just this month in September 2024, and work I've done with friends and colleagues has been drawn upon by various bodies of the Union, EU and national regulators. Individually and collectively I've been involved in bringing cases and complaints about very flagrant forms of online illegality, and one of these efforts even wound its way up to the CJEU.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I also became heavily involved in contact tracing efforts. A group of colleagues and friends from fields such as cryptography, engineering, sensing, and policy collaborated to develop a more human rights-oriented and privacy-preserving approach to Bluetooth contact tracing, which some states were initially, quietly, considering in March 2020. We successfully implemented a more solid and privacy-preserving approach, although the way it was adopted - Apple and Google put it into smartphones without governments having a clear say - left some countries furious, and that in turn has driven a whole load of interesting and important movement around digital sovereignty. This all had to be navigated during the pandemic, which involved supporting and shaping new regulations concerning these technologies, resolutions in the European Parliament, and interpreting European law at the national level.
What does Europe mean to you and why are you interested in it?
Europe in law conjures the EU, even though it's a lot more than that. The EU is this far-from-perfect object, an effort to integrate markets that has been a vehicle for loftier ambitions, particularly around fundamental rights. It's still in the middle of that tension: whether its primary mission is around economic flows, goods and services with fundamental rights dusted on top, or whether we might be seeing something interesting and very human-centred emerge. In digital policy, the Union can range from idealistic to naive. It is a source of change and flux as well as a slow-moving creature of stability. It struggles with political legitimacy and a democratic vision for a fair and just online and informationalised world, but national governments really aren't so hot at providing these things either. It takes on big fish, like harmonising and addressing data-driven harms, and then realises that all the little things get in the way: underpowered member state regulators, lack of interoperable national administrative law, or courts being confused about the purposes of certain emerging rights and freedoms. For an academic, all those tensions are just so interesting, and practically end up affecting so many citizens.
People project a lot of their own meanings onto 'Europe'. Perhaps the fun part is watching the process of everyone trying to make their own meanings real.