User:SeoR/sandbox/Johnny Ryan (activist)

Johnny Ryan is an Irish data and civil rights activist, previously a corporate executive, and an academic, holding a PhD from Cambridge University. He is also the author of two books on the Internet. Ryan is notable for his work on the development of the internet and its use by terrorists, and latterly for his campaigning and litigation to reduce the use of personal data for advertising. Ryan spearheaded a campaign against parts of the advertising technology industry's consent management regime, which were ruled unlawful in the EU in February 2022, requiring the deletion of large amounts of personal data from hundreds of millions of users, held by more than a thousand advertisers and data dealers.

Early life and education
Ryan was born in 1980 and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, in Ballsbridge. He studied at University College Dublin and then at Masters level at the University of Cambridge, receiving an M.Phil. in International Studies in 2005, with a dissertation entitled "Justifying terror : histories of persecution in Irish Republican and Islamist terror campaigns". At 27 years of age, having won an O'Reilly Foundation scholarship, he returned to pursue doctoral studies at Cambridge, under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Andrews, the official historian of MI5. He investigated the use of the Internet by terrorists, especially in recruiting younger people, and his thesis, defended and published in 2011, was entitled "Militant Islamist radicalisation : does the Internet atomise?"

Career
Ryan was Head of Ecosystem at PageFair, a company which worked on Irish anti-adblocking systems.

He also worked for the privacy-orientated browser company, Brave, Inc. He left Brave to work further on data privacy campaigning, securing a post as Senior Fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, funded by Pierre Omidyar's foundation.

Social media, advertising and privacy
Ryan campaigns against trading of personal data, describing it as “biggest data protection breach of all time”.

Official appearances
Ryan has appeared as a witness before

Congress

...In 2018 he was an expert witness before the Grand International Committee on Disinformation and "Fake News"

Publications
Ryan's first book was Countering Militant Islamist Radicalisation on the Internet : A User Driven Strategy to Recover the Web, published in 2007 by the Institute of European Affairs.

In 2010 Reaktion Press released his second book, A history of the internet and the digital future.

Media appearances and podcasts
Ryan has made multiple media appearances