Big Tsek: Joburg’s Private Surveillance Network and our Public Deficit was delivered as the Ruth First Memorial Lecture in 2022.

It focuses on a controversial private camera network being rolled out in South African cities, by a company called Vumacam, to consider why the private power of giant technology companies is so often treated as more palatable and benign than state power.

Download it here.

Track and trace, trial and error is a piece of long-form research for the Media Policy and Democracy Project which focuses on the South African government’s evolving approach to contact tracing and related data collection in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It attempts to piece together how policy decisions were made, how they were implemented, and how effectively the implications for data protection, privacy and related issues were addressed.

Download it here.

Cops and Call Records is a piece of long-form research commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project at the University of Johannesburg; it focuses on lack of regulation in how police officials in South Africa use phone records – a major and mostly overlooked privacy issue with massive legal and ethical implications.

Download it here.

A Patchwork for Privacy is a research report commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project to assess the communications surveillance laws across the Southern African region, which highlights key gaps in privacy protections in the region. The report aims to help address an information gap in surveillance studies, which tend to focus more on the global north.

Download it here.