Kieron O'Hara

Senior Research Fellow, University of Southampton

Kieron O'Hara is a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, supported by the EPSRC project SOCIAM. His interests are in the philosophy, sociology and politics of technology, particularly the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web; key themes are trust, transparency, privacy and the use of technology to support human memory. 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), for the journal 'Foundations and Trends in Web Science'. He has also written extensively on British politics and political theory, and is a research fellow for the Centre for Policy Studies, and a research fellow with CONCEPT: the Nottingham Centre for Normative Political Theory. His latest book is 'Huxley: A Beginner's Guide' (2012), and his latest edited collection is 'The Digital Enlightenment Forum Yearbook 2013: The Value of Personal Data' (2013, edited with Mireille Hildebrandt and Michael Waidner); he is currently engaged in writing about online religious extremism.

He chairs the transparency sector panel for crime and criminal justice for the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. 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, funded by the Information Commissioner's Office. He writes the 'Digital Citizen' column for IEEE Internet Computing.