About us

Peep Beep! is a blog dedicated to privacy and information security law. We cover national and international developments and are enthralled with all sort of things …such as how to recognise our metadata, how to ensure the confidentiality of our correspondences, or how to protect our digital identities!

Here is the Peep Beep! team:

Clare Sullivan

Clare Sullivan

Clare is a cyber-law lawyer and a Professor of Law at the law Center, Georgetown University. She has authored a number of internationally published articles on digital identity and cyber security in the UK, Europe and the US, and a book ‘Digital Identity: An Emergent Legal Concept.’
Her research focuses on the digital identity that people use for transactions in the context of e-government, its legal nature, and how that digital identity can be legally protected. Clare’s research has implications for a number of legal areas particularly the emergent right to identity in this context and its relationship to the right to privacy.
In 2011/12 Clare was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to examine the legal implications of digital identity and cyber security under US law. Digital identity has been designated as a priority area by both Australia and the US governments. This research built on Clare’s earlier comparative research in Australia and Europe.
In 2014 Clare was invited to work with the legal team in the UK on the Super Identity Project, a joint UK/US funded research project which is examining the correlation between on-line and off-line identities. She is currently at Georgetown University in Washington DC on an Endeavour Fellowship to continue her research on digital identity in the context of cyber defence and cyber warfare under the ANZUS treaty.

See Clare’s ssrn papers here.

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon

Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon

Sophie is Professor in Information Technology and Data Governance at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the Director of Ilaws, the Institute for the Law and the Web, and its new core on Law, Internet and Culture ‘iCLIC’.  She is a member of the Southampton Centre of excellence in Cybersecurity and the Web Science Institute.
Sophie is the author of several publications on intermediary liability, data protection and privacy, information security and intellectual property. She has been researching and writing on the liability of Internet intermediaries such as Internet service providers, Web 2.0 platforms, search engines, on the legal implications of deep packet inspection practices implemented by Internet service providers, on the role of hosting providers in relation to malicious webpages, on the standardization of privacy policies and on anonymisation practices.
She is extensively involved in diverse research and consulting. She is leading the legal work conducted for the purposes of the Horizon 2020 FutureTrust and DataPitch Research projects. She has acted as a legal expert for the OCSE, OEDC and the Venice Commission. She was part of the expert group formed by the Council of Europe on intermediary liability (MSI-NET).
Sophie is a talented collage artist and warmly thanks Pixabay.com on behalf of the team!
She is the creator of Peep Beep! and its blogmaster.

See Sophie’s ssrn papers here.

Alison Knight

Alison Knight

Alison is a Senior Legal Adviser,  Lead on Data Governance, and  erstwhile Research Fellow, at the University of Southampton. Before  focusing on GDPR implementation for the University, her research revolved around the legal issues raised by the prospect of creating a Europe-wide data innovation ecosystem that will bring together data owners and Big Data technology providers, with start-ups and SMEs. This research is funded as part of an EU H2020 3-year grant: Data Pitch. Prior  to that, she worked as a Senior Researcher with the Trans-Atlantic, multidisciplinary Super Identity research project, giving legal advice to the team across six universities.

Alison graduated with a Joint Honours Philosophy Degree from the University of Oxford, following which she trained to be a commercial lawyer in the City of London. After qualifying as a Solicitor  in 2001, she spent some years in Brussels specialising in EU law and European Commission investigations, before returning to the UK to work for the Government legal service with a focus on policy-making. Subsequently, she worked for a number of years for a large commercial UK law firm giving full-line advice and training to clients.

Alison has an LLM in Commercial/Technology Law and a MSC in Web Science. Alison’s  PhD research was sponsored by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Web Science Centre of Doctoral Training (CDT) Scholarship. She is a member of the Web Science Institute (WSI), and the Institute for Law and the Web (ILAWS). 

See Alison’s papers here.

Henry Pearce

Henry is a lecturer in law at the University of Hertfordshire where he leads the Privacy and Data Protection module on the LLM programme. He completed an LLB (Hons) at the University of Reading in 2011, and an LLM in Regulation and Technology at King’s College London in 2012 with a grade of distinction and an award for best in year. He is also a PhD candidate at the Institute for Law and the Web at the University of Southampton.

Henry’s research primarily focuses on data protection law and regulation, but he is also interested in the interplay between law and emerging technologies more generally.