Erica Stanford
Erica Stanford is a digital asset, fintech and AI specialist at CMS UK where she consults in a non-legal capacity. She is an industry expert on fraud and fraud prevention and speaks and writes globally about digital assets, digital crime, scams and the integration of AI. She is the author of the bestselling book Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption, which was awarded 'Highly Commended' in the Business Book Awards. She is also author of Risks Relating to Crypto and Digital Assets in 'Crypto and Digital Assets Law and Regulation, Sweet & Maxwell, 2024, An Outline of Scams and Crime in Crypto (chapter 2) in Nick Furneaux's investigative textbook There's no Such Thing as Crypto Crime, as well as Ethical AI and co-author of AI laws and regulation in AI, Machine Learning & Big Data 2024, GLI.
2 Contributions by Erica Stanford
PRACTICE NOTES
AI and Automated Decision‑Making in UK Public Administration: Data Protection, Equality, Human Rights, FOI and Judicial Review—Legal Frameworks, Key Cases and Practical Governance Steps
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) augment or substitute for human decision-makers in UK public administration. Examples include police use of live facial-recognition cameras, automated computations of social security entitlements, predictive environmental modelling, and algorithms proposing planning or licensing outcomes. UK government guidance treats ADM broadly, encompassing both fully automated outputs and tools that support human judgement. The legal principles set out in this Note bite even where a person ostensibly signs off the decision but substantially depends on an AI-derived score or recommendation. These technologies may deliver efficiency yet can trigger legal or comparably weighty consequences for individuals. The UK General Data Protection Regulation, Assimilated Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018), the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998) and the Equality Act 2010 (EqA 2010) impose requirements to ensure automated decisions are lawful, fair and transparent. Public authorities are constrained by common-law administrative obligations, including the need for lawful power, procedural fairness and rationality, as well as freedom of information law. This Practice Note outlines the law and policy on ADM in the public sector, provides an overview of traditional judicial review grounds relevant to AI-assisted decisions and suggests practical steps for...
Public Law
PRACTICE NOTES
Dark web for lawyers: lawful use, criminality, marketplaces, IP risks, crypto payments, tracing and enforcement challenges
This Practice Note provides an introduction to the dark web. It sets out what the dark web is and surveys lawful and unlawful activities and concepts commonly linked to it. This Practice Note does not examine in detail the legal issues arising from policing or committing criminal conduct on the dark web.
What is the dark web?
The part of the internet labelled the dark web is often depicted by the media as a purely sinister criminal underworld reserved for drug trafficking and other illegality. The picture is more complex. The surface web, which is readily accessible to anyone, by some estimates accounts for only a small slice of the internet. The deep web—that is, the portion hidden from the public and not indexed by search engines—largely consists of pages maintained by organisations and governments and is by far the biggest segment (frequently said to be around 90%). The dark web, a subset reachable solely via anonymity networks such as Tor, short for ‘The Onion Routing’ project, and other privacy-focused browsers, is thought to make up roughly 0.1%. However, networks such...
TMT
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