I’m a technology user. I’m part of a generation that grew up immersed in digital technologies: from feature phones and videogames, to social media, digital wallets, mobile apps, streaming platforms, and the list keeps growing. Becoming a researcher in this field has challenged me to interrogate the very systems I once took for granted and the underlying conditions that bring them about.

As a legal scholar, I study how digital technologies intersect with the law. Legal frameworks don’t simply “respond to” the negative or unintended consequences of technology; they often structure the conditions under which harms become thinkable, permissible or visible.

My research begins from everyday forms of technological use and asks how law shapes users’ experiences, expectations, and vulnerabilities; while also opening (or foreclosing) possibilities for accountability, contestation, and justice in the digital age.

Across my work, I show that digital harms are rarely accidental byproducts of innovation. Instead, they emerge at the intersection of legal design, platform governance, and technological choice. This insight animates my research into how law allocates visibility and economic interests in digital systems, how it defines speech and speakers in algorithmic environments, and how it reconfigures labour and creativity in the information economy. Whether examining platform policies, algorithmic outputs, or creative and affective forms of digital work, my scholarship traces how legal categories quietly organise power in computational systems.

This approach is reflected in my broader body of work. I have developed a three-dimensional analytical framework for chatbot technologies in an article published in Philosophy & Technology (Springer), and my doctoral research examined the legal challenges posed by ghostbots, with findings published in Computer Law & Security Review. Ongoing and forthcoming projects extend these insights to questions of platform governance, posthumous data, algorithmic creativity, and the global organisation of digital labour; bringing my three research streams into sustained dialogue with one another.

© 2024 David F. Uriegas. Rights Granted.

Kubik-Rubika-Chernyy-Belyy (CC BY, author unk.). Via godfon.com.

My research also informs how I teach. The questions that animate my scholarship reappear in the classroom as objects of collective inquiry and reflection. 

My students engage with the doctrinal structures of the law but also learn and develop skills to understand legal principles and doctrines as shaped by technological practices and socioeconomic dynamics.

For me, the classroom offers a space to test emerging ideas and refine analytical tools. Student engagements often surface new questions, challenge assumptions, and help me refine how I frame sociotechnical problems for non-specialised audiences.