Hello! I’m a lecturer, researcher, and photographer. I investigate sociotechnical systems infused with algorithms, using a human-centered computing lens. I believe that understanding the vulnerabilities and failures of algorithms is crucial to better govern them.

My research in privacy & security points out the many limitations of privacy technologies, from de-identification to query-based algorithms and differential privacy. my work on adversarial manipulation in algorithmic markets shows that pricing algorithms can be exploited by stronger competitors, leading to sustained collusion that harms consumers and may fall outside of current competition laws.

I am the programme director of the DPhil in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford. I teach the practice of computational social science and the fairness and power imbalance of machine learning systems at the Oxford Internet Institute.

I received my PhD from the Université catholique de Louvain in 2019 and worked as a researcher at the Data Science Institute and Computational Privacy Group of Imperial College London, at the ENS de Lyon, and at the MIT Media Lab. My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences (Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Nature Scientific Data, Usenix Security, JMLR, WWW) and is regularly covered in the press (New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Forbes, El Pais, Scientific American) as well as featured in BBC World Service, France TV, RTBF TV and Radio, Radio Canada.

I lead the Observatory of Anonymity, an international interactive website in 89 countries where visitors can find out what makes them more vulnerable to re-identification and where researchers can test the anonymity of their research data.

You can contact me by email at X@Y where X=luc.rocher and Y=oii.ox.ac.uk. Follow me on Mastodon (@cynddl@mamot.fr), Bluesky (@rocher.lc), and LinkedIn for occasional research updates.

pronouns: they/them.