Can technology and privacy be friends at last?

Abstract:

It seems that technological IT advances inevitably degrade one’s privacy: convenient infrastructures such as mobile phones and social networks are turned into mass surveillance mechanisms; new business models based on targeted advertising and personalized tariffs rely on huge databases of personal profiles; beyond malice, accidental losses of laptops, hard discs or CDs in the post regularly feature in the news; and finally social goods like public health monitoring or security are increasingly based on personal information. Is the age of privacy truly over?

In this tutorial we discuss the profound impact technology has had on notions of privacy, including the current state of the art when it comes to privacy invasion. Yet, we argue that privacy invasion is often an unintended by-product of systems that could instead be engineered to be privacy friendly. We will provide a short introduction to a menu of practical privacy technologies ranging from lab prototypes, to mechanisms you can re-use as part of your research to software you can use today. We also outline principles of privacy-by-design you can use to minimize the impact your technology has on privacy, including generic privacy-preserving design patterns that are surprisingly powerful.

Bio:

“George Danezis is a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge specializing in security and privacy technologies. His interests include anonymization and privacy mechanisms for computations and communications, the application of advanced statistical techniques to computer security problems, peer-to-peer computing and censorship resistance. He is a member of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium board (PETS), has chaired the program of PETS twice, as well as Financial Cryptography and the ACM conference on Computers and Communications Security. He is also active in technology policy discussions and regularly advices the EU, national governments and civil society organizations on privacy technology.”