AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Birmingham
Department Name: School of Computer Science
Abstract
The online world is a curious but uncertain world. It enriches many facets of life but at the same time exposes citizens to a variety of threats that may cause harm to them, their loved ones and to wider society. Many of these harms result from a complex interaction of societal processes driven by diverse stakeholders-we call these Complex Harms.
Consider for example smart homes, with devices that manage energy usage, CCTV cameras for the garage and increasingly integrated IT components throughout the house. With such technology, the dynamics in families may change, for instance offering monitoring capabilities. This may results in harms that may include domestic violence, loss of privacy and gathering of disproprotionately large sets of population data by large industries.
This raises a number of questions: What is the role of the individual, friends and family to mitigate potential harms? How can one work with the device provider to minimize harm? Should the law interfere? The AGENCY project will use a number of case studies to answer these questions: HealthTech, Identity Management, Smart Homes and Online Disinformation.
Complex harms such as above tend to happen to citizens, and, in most cases, they are not purposely caused or easily controlled by citizens. The AGENCY project believes firmly that establishing citizen agency is an absolutely necessary ingredient for any transformative approaches that resolve these complex harms. Citizens need to be empowered through agency-enhanching technologies, behaviours and processes to gain a sense of control, ownership, security, and consequently trust in their online activities.
Protecting against complex harms is a wicked problem because so many stakeholder are involved, and because many harms are unintended consequences of the practical use and evolution of technology. Therefore, mitigating complex harms requires interdisciplinary co-design principles, technology foundations and collaborative governance procedures to assure online citizen agency in the presence of multiple stakeholder interests. The project brings together computer science, user-centered design, business, psychology, sociology, legal and ethical experts.
If AGENCY succeeds, it will provide a profound understanding of the role of online agency in protecting citizens and will deliver collaborative methods, technological building blocks and scientifically grounded best practices for our society to provide more proactive and structured approaches to protecting citizens online.
Consider for example smart homes, with devices that manage energy usage, CCTV cameras for the garage and increasingly integrated IT components throughout the house. With such technology, the dynamics in families may change, for instance offering monitoring capabilities. This may results in harms that may include domestic violence, loss of privacy and gathering of disproprotionately large sets of population data by large industries.
This raises a number of questions: What is the role of the individual, friends and family to mitigate potential harms? How can one work with the device provider to minimize harm? Should the law interfere? The AGENCY project will use a number of case studies to answer these questions: HealthTech, Identity Management, Smart Homes and Online Disinformation.
Complex harms such as above tend to happen to citizens, and, in most cases, they are not purposely caused or easily controlled by citizens. The AGENCY project believes firmly that establishing citizen agency is an absolutely necessary ingredient for any transformative approaches that resolve these complex harms. Citizens need to be empowered through agency-enhanching technologies, behaviours and processes to gain a sense of control, ownership, security, and consequently trust in their online activities.
Protecting against complex harms is a wicked problem because so many stakeholder are involved, and because many harms are unintended consequences of the practical use and evolution of technology. Therefore, mitigating complex harms requires interdisciplinary co-design principles, technology foundations and collaborative governance procedures to assure online citizen agency in the presence of multiple stakeholder interests. The project brings together computer science, user-centered design, business, psychology, sociology, legal and ethical experts.
If AGENCY succeeds, it will provide a profound understanding of the role of online agency in protecting citizens and will deliver collaborative methods, technological building blocks and scientifically grounded best practices for our society to provide more proactive and structured approaches to protecting citizens online.
Organisations
- University of Birmingham (Lead Research Organisation)
- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) (Collaboration)
- Yoti Ltd (Project Partner)
- Citizens Advice Northumberland (Project Partner)
- SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH (Project Partner)
- Active Building Centre (Project Partner)
- Future Homes Alliance (Project Partner)
- The Angelou Centre (Project Partner)
- Atom Bank plc (Project Partner)
Publications

Arnau-González P
(2023)
Toward Automatic Tutoring of Math Word Problems in Intelligent Tutoring Systems
in IEEE Access

Clarke J
(2024)
Invisible, Unreadable, and Inaudible Cookie Notices: An Evaluation of Cookie Notices for Users with Visual Impairments
in ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing


Olabode S
(2023)
Complex Online Harms and the Smart Home: A Scoping Review
in SSRN Electronic Journal

Olabode S
(2023)
Complex online harms and the smart home: A scoping review
in Future Generation Computer Systems

Owens R
(2023)
Reimagining AI Governance: a Response by AGENCY to the UK Government's White Paper AI Regulation
in SSRN Electronic Journal

Related Projects
Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Award Value |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
EP/W032481/1 | 31/03/2022 | 13/07/2022 | £2,793,095 | ||
EP/W032481/2 | Transfer | EP/W032481/1 | 14/07/2022 | 30/03/2025 | £2,674,250 |
Description | AGENCY's response to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee's inquiry on large language models (LLM) |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
URL | https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/124223/html/ |
Description | AGENCY's response to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee's inquiry: The future of news: impartiality, trust and technology |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
URL | https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/128358/pdf/ |
Title | MKPHOTO2023 |
Description | The MKPHOTO2023 dataset is designed to research the types of profile photos used by different types of malicious social bots. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2024 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
Impact | This dataset used for estimation of impact of AI-Generated photos on malicious social bots. |
URL | https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/guardeec/mkphoto2023 |
Description | FCA Finclusion Techsprint |
Organisation | Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Public |
PI Contribution | The collaboration involves the development of an AI-powered solution aimed at simplifying complex legal and financial services. This initiative is intended to provide users with the essential tools to understand everyday financial services and increase their chances of obtaining approval for a suitable financial product. |
Collaborator Contribution | The TechSprint provides access to the FCA's digital sandbox platform and FCA coordinators who provide advice on our solution. |
Impact | It represents a multidisciplinary collaboration involving law, computer science, and business. |
Start Year | 2024 |
Title | ARElight |
Description | ARElight is an application for a granular view onto sentiments between mentioned named entities in texts. |
Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
Year Produced | 2024 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | The escalating volume of textual data necessitates adept and scalable Information Extraction (IE) systems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse massive text collections in a detailed manner. While most deep learning systems are designed to handle textual information as it is, the gap in the existence of the interface between a document and the annotation of its parts is still poorly covered. Concurrently, one of the major limitations of most deep-learning models is a constrained input size caused by architectural and computational specifics. To address this, we introduce ARElight, a system designed to efficiently manage and extract information from sequences of large documents by dividing them into segments with mentioned object pairs. Through a pipeline comprising modules for text sampling, inference, optional graph operations, and visualisation, the proposed system transforms large volumes of text in a structured manner. |
URL | https://guardeec.github.io/arelight_demo/template.html |
Description | AGENCY: EULA analysis workshops |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
Results and Impact | Sires of co-design workshops on how citizens understand texts of privacy policies and user agreements. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
URL | https://guardeec.github.io/UELA_workshop/index.html |
Description | Birmingham Tech Week |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Regional |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Birmingham Tech Week is the main annual event for technology advances in the West Midlands. This item refers to the invited presentation about research in the FinTrust, UKFin and AGENCY projesct |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Keynote at ValueTools conference |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | An invited keynote at an academic conference to present work on financial inclusion and related issues. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
Description | Post-CHI summer school |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | The summer school included a mix of keynotes and lessons from prominent academic and industry scholars working on interdisciplinary research on topics within the domain of Usable Privacy and Security. We participate in guided hands-on activities for applying what we have learned to devise novel solutions and/or research ideas for addressing practical challenges in privacy and security. It also included lab tours of academic research groups and/or industry sites in Munich University and Google. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
URL | https://postchisummerschools.uol.de/usable-privacy-and-security/ |