Publications

This book offers an in-depth, objective analysis of the three dominant regulatory models for digitalization—market-driven by the US, state-driven by China, and citizen-driven by the EU—and their global impacts on data, digital platforms, and the internet, highlighting the current geo-political struggles and possible future scenarios.

Switzerland’s E-ID journey so far In 2021, the Swiss E-ID law proposition was rejected by a public referendum. The reason for the refusal was due to privacy concerns in the implementation and management of that system. In a nutshell, the idea that a private entity would be in control of…

This book explores China's agenda to establish itself as a cyber superpower through their strategic data governance approach, which, the author Aynne Kokas suggests, could pose a threat to global data autonomy.

For this Factory Update called “Ethical EOF” we invited Sylvain from Prof. Carmela Troncoso’s SPRING lab. He gave us an introduction to “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)”. We learnt how it can be used in privacy-preserving technologies (PET). Sylvain presented a use case to us which is federated learning. As FHE…

Part of the work of the C4DT Factory is the creation of demonstrators (proof of concepts) of technology coming out of the EPFL/IC labs. After two years we archive them and provide you with the means to easily run the demo on your computer instead. That way the demo remains…

This report summarizes the key results of the 2. Workshop on Digital Service Public held with 20 stakeholders from Swiss public administration, politics, industry, interest groups, civil society and academia.

As part of our work on the digital public service in Switzerland, we have written an initial working paper in which we focused in particular on the question of the future of the traditional service public in the context of progressive platformization.

Julia Rebstein, a student from the GymInf program, just finished and presented her project “Trace(r)s on the web – Julia Rebstein“. In it, she explains how different types of cookies work, and looks at a 1-week sample of browsing sessions from 10 persons. Under the supervision of Linus Gasser and…

In this issue brief, C4DT Digital Trust Policy Fellow Leonila Guglya examines international digital product regulations that are of key relevance to the ICT community, such as mandatory disclosure of source code, use of cryptography, cybersecurity standards, and nondiscrimination rules.

In this book lawyer Jamie Susskind addresses the issue of the unaccountable power exerted by Big Tech. Susskind problematizes the fundamental challenges that the engineers who design and control digital technology pose to democratic power and legitimacy.

Development in research is very different from development in an industrial context. Many popular DevOps tools can nonetheless be effectively used in research development as well. Docker, an open-source containerization platform, is one such a tool. This blog post shows how Docker can help you develop the software needed for…

This book provides and excellent analysis of how digital platforms have become so powerful and so pervasive that they have by now permeated every corner of society and social life to the point that they determine, at least in part, the way society operates.

This recent book by Pradip Ninan Thomas approaches the phenomenon of digital platforms, digitalization, and Big Tech from a non-Western, cultural perspective, which makes it a very welcome contribution to the study of digitalization.