Anya Orlova

Anna is a PhD candidate at the Freie University of Berlin. She researches cyber discrimination and its implication to digital privacy in the context of networked digital communities. The main focus of Anna's PhD dissertation is on forms of severe cyber discrimination and social forms of digital activism, looking into how online harassment is influencing online behaviour of networked digital community members. She is working on identifying the strategies of coping with cyber discrimination and analysing cases of how networked digital communities proactively and sustainably manage these issues.

Anna graduated from the Department of Sociology at Saint-Petersburg State University in Russia and the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She started developing her interest in digital privacy during her Master studies, whilst writing her thesis on e-government systems in Germany. She started her PhD at the Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin before transferring to Freie University, researching how privacy advocacy and digital activism are shaping current privacy debate.