Professor of Internet Law, University of Essex

Lorna Woods is Professor of Internet Law at the University of Essex. She started her career as a practising solicitor in a technology, media and telecommunications practice in the City of London. She has extensive experience in the field of media policy and communications regulation, including data protection, social media and the Internet. She has also contributed to many commissioned studies, including the RAND Study on Options for and Effectiveness of Internet Self- and Co-Regulation’ (2007), the Hans Bredow Study on Co-regulation and the Media (2006) and the European Audiovisual Observatory study into Media Pluralism and Competition Issues (2020).

Her expertise in these fields is reflected in the fact that she has been asked on numerous occasions to give oral evidence to Parliamentary inquiries across the technology, media and telecommunications sectors both in the UK and abroad. She has worked with international organisations - for example, chairing an Expert Working Group on Content Moderation and AI for the OSCE's Representative for Freedom of the Media's SAIFE initiative. She also has a long-standing interest in privacy, especially privacy in public places and the law relating to surveillance, and is well-known as a European lawyer for the Textbook on EU Law (Steiner and Woods).

Lorna's research project with Carnegie UK Trust, which was shortlisted in 2019 for Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, was on reducing harm arising on social media. The Carnegie project introduced a systems-based approach to social media regulation, rather than an approach focusing on direct content regulation, and proposed that platform operators be subject to a statutory duty of care. The proposal was adopted in the 2019 Online Harms White Paper. The impact of her work has been recognised in both Houses of Parliament and in recognition of her work she was awarded an OBE in 2020 for her services to internet safety policy. She continues this work with the Online Safety Act Implementation Network.

She is serving a second term as a member of the ESRC Peer Review College, is an affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, and is a senior associate research fellow at the Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Professor Woods is a member of the Digital Freedom Fund's Panel of Experts, a member of the AI Group of the Society for Computers and Law and a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts. She was also a member of a group of advisors who supported the Surveillance Camera Commissioner in his role (a group established by virtue of paragraph 5.7 of the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice) and has sat on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) National User Group, advising the Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Police since 2015. She was also a member of the IMPRESS Code Committee (2015-2020).