Dr John Dempsey

John is the Director of the Cybercrime strand of the Criminal Justice Partnership, and the Assistant Editor of the School of Law and Policing’s student journal “The Showcase”. He is Director of Studies for students researching the use of technology within “Missing Persons” investigations, and asset recovery from cryptocurrency.

The focus of Child Computer Interaction has been about the inclusion of children in the design process to improve their experiences of digital technologies in a positive way. One area that has largely been neglected, until recently, is the design process for online safety, including parental concerns and education. January 2021, the United Nations have adopted the “general comment 25” which describes the rights of children in relation to the digital environment which, among other things, says that children have the right to privacy while using the digital environment. John’s research is underpinned by the principle that children disclose too much information online, either to other people, or to 3rd parties such as businesses; and that once that information is disclosed it is impossible (or at least, really difficult) for that to be forgotten. Businesses may sell that data, the data may be processed to build profiles, and profiles may be targeted for advertising purposes/commercialisation. People may use that information for completely innocent reasons but may also use it for cyber-bullying or other evil purposes.

John developed a set of guidelines which help system designers develop privacy enhancing tools within their own computer systems. The guidelines provide principles which can be applied within different product contexts. Over 140 children were involved in a participatory design session that led to the development of the design guidelines; these design guidelines were then used by a professional designer before being tested/evaluated by another group of children.

While online child safety is John’s main concern, his other research interests include the use of technology within a digital forensic investigation. For example, he has researched the impact of “non-deterministic disk sectors” on the cryptographic hash functions that are commonly used to detect changes within digital evidence.