Her mother, Ellen (née Place), married Glen in 1957, and they settled in California in 1960, living in the college town of Davis, and moving to Menlo Park on his retirement.
[8] Lillington taught at San Jose State University in the early 1990s, while pursuing her PhD, and it was at this stage that she secured her first e-mail account and pre-World Wide Web Internet access, and her interest in matters of technology developed from this.
[6] She had worked in student journalism at UC Santa Barbara, including holding the post of editor of The Daily Nexus paper,[5] and of the biweekly magazine, Portal.
The first article in the paper's archives was on the arts, specifically the launch of the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature,[10] while the majority were on the interface of technology with society and business.
[11] She has, however, also written in other areas, and sometimes followed up on such pieces, writing, for example, on the need for greater animal welfare control of puppy and horse breeding in 2004, and, frustrated that her article was still widely quoted because the problems had not changed, returning to the topic in 2017.
Middle-aged readers were familiarized in her lively columns with the argot of a new field: 'spam', 'identity fraud', 'downloads', 'search engine', ..."[14] Brown further highlighted a selection of her articles, including "Our Past Is Not So Far Behind Us", which mused on Ireland's past emigration situation, and the new technology multinationals, on the potential conflict between blogging and journalism, and on the conflict between Ireland's need for immigrants to power "new economy"-based growth and fears of the potential impact of such migration.
[22] Lillington has raised a number of privacy concerns, especially around social media, and also online platform nuisance issues, and cancelled her account on LinkedIn over the latter.
[23] Her work also grounded the Digital Rights Ireland appeal to the European Court of Justice which resulted in the voiding of the EU Data Retention Directive.