A smart home’s thermostat, camera, and voice assistant can become tools for domestic abuse or mass data harvesting—and citizens have little power to stop it. The AGENCY project tackles this gap: while technology companies and lawmakers debate responsibility, individuals are left without practical ways to control how their own devices are used against them. The project studies four real-world cases—health tech, identity management, smart homes, and online disinformation—to understand how complex harms emerge from the interaction of multiple stakeholders, not from any single malicious actor. If successful, AGENCY will produce co-designed technical tools, governance procedures, and behavioural guidelines that give citizens genuine agency—the ability to understand, limit, and report harms without needing a law degree or a software engineer. This matters because current approaches react after harm occurs; AGENCY aims to build proactive safeguards into the systems themselves. The project is applied and interdisciplinary, combining computer science, psychology, law, and user-centred design to deliver practical, scalable solutions for regulators, device makers, and the public.
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The online world is a curious but uncertain world. It enriches many facets of life but at the same time exposes citizens to a variety of threats that may cause harm to them, their loved ones and to wider society. Many of these harms result from a complex interaction of societal processes driven by diverse stakeholders-we call these Complex Harms. Consider for example smart homes, with devices that manage energy usage, CCTV cameras for the garage and increasingly integrated IT components throughout the house. With such technology, the dynamics in families may change, for instance offering monitoring capabilities. This may results in harms that may include domestic violence, loss of privacy and gathering of disproprotionately large sets of population data by large industries. This raises a number of questions: What is the role of the individual, friends and family to mitigate potential harms? How can one work with the device provider to minimize harm? Should the law interfere? The AGENCY project will use a number of case studies to answer these questions: HealthTech, Identity Management, Smart Homes and Online Disinformation. Complex harms such as above tend to happen to citizens, and, in most cases, they are not purposely caused or easily controlled by citizens. The AGENCY project believes firmly that establishing citizen agency is an absolutely necessary ingredient for any transformative approaches that resolve these complex harms. Citizens need to be empowered through agency-enhanching technologies, behaviours and processes to gain a sense of control, ownership, security, and consequently trust in their online activities. Protecting against complex harms is a wicked problem because so many stakeholder are involved, and because many harms are unintended consequences of the practical use and evolution of technology. Therefore, mitigating complex harms requires interdisciplinary co-design principles, technology foundations and collaborative governance procedures to assure online citizen agency in the presence of multiple stakeholder interests. The project brings together computer science, user-centered design, business, psychology, sociology, legal and ethical experts. If AGENCY succeeds, it will provide a profound understanding of the role of online agency in protecting citizens and will deliver collaborative methods, technological building blocks and scientifically grounded best practices for our society to provide more proactive and structured approaches to protecting citizens online.
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