REPHRAIN directs the UK’s considerable academic, industry, policy, and third sector resources to deliver novel socio-technical advances that address the tensions and imbalances between the socio-economic benefits of a digital economy and the online harms that manifest. The Centre redresses this balance through fundamental interdisciplinary research on the underpinning key tensions that reflect the critical debates impacting the future of industry, policy, practice and society-at-large. Each project addresses multiple scientific objectives, therefore may cross multiple missions, providing theoretically, empirically and experimentally grounded outcomes that bring balance, assurance and stability with respect to protecting citizens online. As they begin to develop these outcomes will be collated both in support of projects yet to start and made available via the REPHRAIN Toolbox, addressing a comprehensive set of harms.
Inaugural Projects
In its establishment, REPHRAIN conceived 25 inaugural projects from its five founding institutions across the three Missions. Each project addresses multiple scientific objectives, therefore may cross multiple missions, providing theoretically, empirically and experimentally grounded outcomes that bring balance, assurance and stability with respect to protecting citizens online. As they begin to develop these outcomes will be collated both in support of projects yet to start and made available via the REPHRAIN Toolbox, addressing a comprehensive set of harms.
June 5, 2023
This project aims to investigate consumer perspectives on the use and sharing of PETs-related data by various types of ‘legitimate’ organisations. In particular, it will explore […]
July 11, 2023
This project will investigate the use of formal methods in providing high-assurance, high-performance privacy-preserving data analytics solutions, and in ensuring their secure use. In particular, we […]
July 11, 2023
This project will analyse the current (and future potential) abuse of commercially available PETs for criminal purposes, using specific online harms as primary case examples, and […]
July 11, 2023
A dedicated speculative space for citizens and publics to liaise with researchers, technologists and policy makers, to explore new technologies and data services, informing policy/practice guidelines […]
July 12, 2023
A multimodal machine learning based study of medical misinformation on social networks. Medical misinformation, popular science and alternative medicine thrives online in social networks where communities […]
July 12, 2023
A decade of unprecedented growth in the field of personal data collection and analysis, as well as the increased ‘datification’ of ordinary life, has lead to […]
July 12, 2023
Understanding the role of contexts in managing privacy online through AI-agents. In online social systems, users are allowed to create and share content about themselves and […]
July 12, 2023
Exploring users experiences and concepts of privacy and online harms with respect to VR avatars. The ways in which social behaviour and self-presentation is experienced online […]
July 12, 2023
This project will provide transparency tools for AI-based systems to explain how they manage users’ data and co-create interfaces that allow users to influence it. The […]
July 12, 2023
Exploring online extremism and its effects offline by looking at recruitment tools, a survey of intervention tools to combat radicalization, and the impact on free speech […]
October 11, 2023
Our aim is to inform users of the value of their data. We envision a system where instead of simply asking for permission from a user […]
October 11, 2023
A key challenge for the mitigation of online harms is the need to identify the ways in which regulators, practitioners and researchers can have joint understandings […]
October 11, 2023
The act of engaging with digital services and devices is often considered a sub-component of online harm. Specifically, a considerable body of work has observed associations […]
October 11, 2023
This empirical project aims to analyse the roles of PETs, from both legal and regulatory perspectives, in protecting fundamental rights and freedoms, such as data protection […]
October 11, 2023
A philosophical analysis of online manipulation on social media platforms focusing on the disruption of democratic processes. One of the most interesting phenomena in current international […]
October 11, 2023
The aim will be to investigate how effectively and efficiently anonymous communication networks (ACN) can act as “add-ons” between applications that do not have privacy built-in […]
October 11, 2023
Several strategies are routinely used by social media companies, governments, and online communities to mitigate online harms. These include setting community standards, removing content that violates […]
October 11, 2023
Personality information can be used as part of adversarial manipulation of an individual, making them more vulnerable to attacks on their reasoning process – whether the […]
October 11, 2023
While violent crime and theft has been decreasing since the mid-90’s, fraud has now become the most common type of crime in the UK at 3.7 […]
October 11, 2023
The aim of this project is to create the building blocks for AI-based systems to be able to learn and reason about the privacy norms users […]
October 11, 2023
With the widespread use of resource-constrained devices such as RFID sensors, IoT, etc. the area of lightweight cryptography has become increasingly important. For evidence we can […]
October 11, 2023
Current research efforts on online harms (abuse, hate, dis/misinformation, cyberbullying, revenge pornography, etc.) have focused on examining single platforms (e.g., Twitter or Facebook) and/or isolating known […]
October 11, 2023
This project will investigate the role of alternative online subcultures in the promotion of violence, through a data-driven comparative analysis of content across several (Chan) platforms. […]
October 11, 2023
Sequential data model useful information about individuals, such as their visited locations, purchased products, or genomic information. Thus, sequential data are often collected from individuals and […]
October 11, 2023
There are a number of ‘directories’ or ‘rankings’ of governmental approaches to civil society privacy, cybersecurity, and freedom of expression online. While these can be useful […]
Strategic Funding Calls
Following successful REPHRAIN Strategic Funding Calls, we have launched several new projects at new partner institutions, as listed below. As with our inaugural projects, each project addresses multiple scientific objectives, and therefore may cross multiple missions, providing theoretically, empirically and experimentally grounded outcomes that bring balance, assurance and stability with respect to protecting citizens online. We look forward to sharing these outcomes with you, adding to our comprehensive set of online harms.
Strategic Funding Projects
Call 1
October 11, 2023
This project will consider the evaluation of the applicability of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 for intimate partner violence (IPV) to give a better understanding of […]
October 11, 2023
This project aims to investigate the harms posed by the recent and unprecedented availability of unlicensed Covid19 vaccines, fake test certificates and other related goods and […]
October 11, 2023
This 12-month interdisciplinary project will investigate the role of adaptive hate speech awareness mechanisms in reducing the production of hate speech across online social platforms.
October 11, 2023
This project will study the three-way dynamics between storage PETs, ransomware, and ransomware defences via a testbed approach. This is important because of the potential privacy-damaging […]
October 11, 2023
This project will propose a novel phishing-advice tool, PhishEd, which accepts reports from users of potential phishing emails, uses AI to parse out contextual phishing features, […]
October 11, 2023
PORTAS focuses on the development of artificial intelligence techniques for the detection, investigation and potential disruption of organised crime group (OCG) activity on online platforms.
October 11, 2023
PriXR intends to harden Extended Reality (XR) technology against violations of privacy and anonymity, crucially exploring XR not in terms of its benefits to society, but […]
October 11, 2023
The project proposed here brings a socio-technical approach to Explainable AI, in order to help users develop appropriate trust and avoid online harm. The proposed project […]
Strategic Funding Projects
Call 2
October 11, 2023
DSNmod tackles the challenges of decentralised moderation. Traditional social networks such as Twitter or Facebook can concentrate large amounts of resources and data for content moderation, […]
October 11, 2023
This 12-month interdisciplinary project will investigate current practices in relation to the drivers and unique obstacles that SMEs face, in making privacy-aware decisions. This work seeks […]
October 11, 2023
Consumers use insurance to smooth finances following incidents including fires at home, car accidents, theft, travel disasters and more. In recent years, insurers have started to […]
October 11, 2023
The project proposed here brings a multidisciplinary approach to achieve true consent online through subtraction and work with unemployed people. The project will identify user needs […]
Strategic Funding Projects
Call 3
October 11, 2023
Cryptocurrency has evolved from a niche application developed by activists to a wide-scale form of payment. This trend is likely to accelerate because of banks’ interests, […]
October 11, 2023
The development of a child sexual abuse conversation (CSAC) dataset, this 9-month project will lead to advances in our understanding of how perpetrators of child sex […]
October 11, 2023
The way that video games make money has changed. Beginning in the mid-2000s, a novel monetisation strategy began to emerge in which games were not treated […]
October 11, 2023
The main goal of MetaSafeChild is to make Social Virtual Reality safer for children. The project aims to a) assess the potential harms faced by children […]
October 11, 2023
The overall vision of this project is to investigate the role and provision of synthetic dataset for developing, evaluating, and comparing techniques for protecting young people […]
October 11, 2023
The Protecting Girls from Online Harm: an inner-city exploration (PGOH) project aims to address the challenge of protecting young people (under 18) from online harms (including, […]
October 11, 2023
The SELF-PROTECT project explores the problem of government threats to citizens’ digital privacy from the interdisciplinary perspectives of psychology and computer science. The objectives are to: […]
October 11, 2023
Sextortion is a form of blackmail in which images of the victim nude or engaged in sexual acts are used as leverage by the offender. Typically, […]
October 11, 2023
The Metaverse (MV) has many positive features for children and young people’s cognitive, social and emotional development (Chang et al, 2020; Pallavicini & Pepe, 2020), but […]
Strategic Funding Projects
Call 4
March 20, 2025
In partnership with SARSAS, the Survivors Trust, and Survivors Voices, we will conduct research to understand the experiences of survivors of non-recent, online-facilitated child sexual abuse […]
March 18, 2025
The vast popularity of social media led to an unparalleled rise of financial influencers, the so-called “finfluencers”, who exploit those platforms to disseminate financial-related content and […]
March 20, 2025
This project addresses the global issue of online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs), where research and safety provisions lag behind high-income […]
March 20, 2025
Generative AI has had a major impact on the academic landscape since the emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022. Yet much of the ethical discourse has […]
Strategic Funding Projects
Call 5
March 20, 2025
DAARC will apply the ‘Design Against Crime’ approach to Augmented Reality (AR) devices, systems and platforms, to identify new ways of anticipating and preventing either (a) […]
March 20, 2025
SaferVR investigates the unique risks faced by adults with intellectual disabilities in social virtual reality environments, including issues like harassment and accidental data exposure. The project […]
March 20, 2025
User reporting is an important platform tool to defend against online harms, including harassment. Yet a recent report from the Turing Institute based on a large-scale […]
SAFER STREETS
February 16, 2026
This creative arts-research, pilot project responds to Strand 1: Understanding crime-related issues locally and potential for targeted prevention. We will run three workshops in a small […]
February 16, 2026
Neighbourhood Signals investigates how hyperlocal digital discourse maps onto offline crime dynamics across UK communities. Using a large longitudinal dataset from the hyperlocal Nextdoor platform linked […]
February 6, 2026
Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) is one of the most urgent challenges facing our communities today, and tackling it is central to the Government’s Safer […]
February 16, 2026
VR-CLiCS (Child Local Clinics for Safety in Virtual Environments) adapts REPHRAIN’s Privacy Clinics model to focus on the safety of young people (12–17) in social VR […]