Projects

Brainbox is the project lead for the Action Coalition on Meaningful Transparency (ACT), a global multi-stakeholder coalition pushing for effective tech transparency that promotes human rights. The coalition includes tech companies, regulators, civil society organisations, and academics.

In partnership with Verb and the Digital Legal Systems Lab, Brainbox is carrying out legal research and design with Āhau, a platform developing a decentralised digital identity services for iwi and hapū to register their tribal affiliations.

New Zealand is among the countries around the world looking to regulate disinformation and other user-generated content. Brainbox is conducting legal research with funding from the Borrin Foundation and InternetNZ to investigate how disinformation can be approached as a policy problem without undermining human rights principles.

In partnership with Verb via the Digital Legal Systems Lab, Brainbox is working with Taumata Arowai to implement water quality rules for drinking water into digital reporting systems.

Legal materials like legislation, regulations, and other rules are still published in a way that prioritises paper-based display. Brainbox is working through the Digital Legal Systems Lab to prepare publicly available machine-structured legislation, to enhance usability and collaboration among stakeholders.

Increasingly, law and legal activities are implemented and performed through digital systems. This presents both risk and opportunity. Brainbox is working with long-time partner, Verb, to conduct public-facing experiments showing how technology itself can be used for regulatory purposes. We are doing this through the Digital Legal Systems Lab.

Governments increasingly perceive analysis of social media activity as an operational necessity, and not always in a law enforcement context. But if such analysis is to be performed, it must be done transparently, accountably, and with adequate safeguards to protect human rights, justify public trust, and preserve the public good. This report prepared for New Zealand's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet lays out the challenges to doing so and makes the case that any systematic social media analysis should be performed by an independent entity that sits outside of government.

Institutional investors representing $13 trillion issued an ultimatum after the Christchurch attacks: platform companies must do better. Two years on, how have they performed? What is the trend of global regulation?

Brainbox worked with the University of Otago and the Global Partnership on AI's responsible AI working group. GPAI was proposing collaborative study of how social media recommendation systems deal with terrorist content.

Following our work on social media regulation for the investor coalition and for GPAI, we were asked to present our findings by New Zealand's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, responsible for online safety and the Christchurch Call.

Brainbox submitted to the Government Administration Committee on a proposed national internet filter, drawing on our research and consulting in related areas.

In 2018, Brainbox received support from the New Zealand Law Foundation to publish a report called 'Perception Inception', which looked at the legal implications of emerging synthetic media technologies, including "deepfakes".

A global and national movement has led progress toward enforceable rights for disabled people. Brainbox collaborated to design legislation that would enforce Accessibility for all New Zealanders.

A global movement called "rules as code" claims law should be translated into computer languages. Legislation could be drafted and implemented as code. What are the merits of this concept and what should policy makers know?

COVID-19 policy is moving rapidly, cutting across a range of policy areas and fundamental human rights. We worked with Antistatic to prepare a series of briefings to support the Commission to fulfil its statutory role.

New Zealand law doesn't make it clear whether synthesising sexual imagery of someone without their consent is criminal. We made a submission to the Justice Committee outlining how the law should be fixed.

Brainbox collaborated with Openlaw NZ to build an open source research tool for analysing case law at scale. In the process, we outlined a superior system of judicial publishing that would increase access to decisions.

Brainbox has published work on dispute resolution systems and access to justice: in medico-legal disputes; and in an online safety context. See our submission on the proposed New Zealand voluntary code on online harms and safety.

Following the publication of our report about the legal implications of deepfake technology and synthetic media, we organised and hosted a forum of around 13 government agencies and regulators to share our findings.

With Serena Chen, Tom Barraclough hosted a session at InternetNZ's annual conference, NetHui, in 2019.