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Topics in Privacy |
The following schedule and descriptions are tentative. Topics are usually not posted earlier than the week before.
| Date | Speaker/Discussant | Topic | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3/14 | group discussion | Semester Launch | |||
| 3/21 | Bernard Rous ACM Director of Publications | Confidentiality of Researcher Registries | |||
| 3/28 | group discussion | Issue spotting: Academic Publication Registries | |||
| 4/4 | Bernard Rous and David Abrams | Academic Publication Registries as Academic Credit Bureaus | |||
| 4/11 | David Abrams Harvard Law School | Supreme Court Decision in the Jones Case on GPS Privacy | |||
| 4/18 | group discussion | Issue Spotting: The Jones GPS Privacy Case | |||
| 4/25 | Latanya Sweeney Data Privacy Lab, Harvard | MyDataCan™: Your Data in Your Hands | |||
| 5/2 | Vashek Matyas Masaryk University Brno, CZ | Monetary Valuation of Private Information | |||
| 5/9 | Ethan Zuckerman, MIT | Possible Metrics for Internet Freedom - Potentials and Challenges | |||
| 5/16 | Robert Gellman, Privacy and Information Policy Consultant | Current Activities in Privacy: the Department of Commerce and the New Multistakeholder Process | |||
| 5/23 | |||||
| 5/30 | |||||
We will start this semester of TIP discussions with a brainstorming overview of two specific TIP-based projects to tackle this semester --namely, (1) privacy tags for databases; and, (2) a whistle-blower website for reporting data issues. We will also have some extended time this week allowing everyone to report on their own recent activities.
How should research contributor identifier registries approach confidentiality?
ORCID aims to solve the international author/contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes. These identifiers, and the relationships among them, can be linked to the researcher's output to enhance the scientific discovery process and to improve the efficiency of research funding and collaboration within the research community.
The core service provided by ORCID is a registry of assigned identifiers, along with information corresponding to each authors "public" identity, including their name and institutional affiliation.
ORCID is considering the storage of other information related to individual authors such as their history of institutional affiliations, grants, and publication. This would be used both to maintain the integrity of the core registry (e.g. to aid in the disambiguation of author names) and to offer other services.
In this session, we will brainstorm over privacy and trust issues in academic registries using the ORCID model as an exemplar. See talk #2 above.
This is our concluding session for issue spotting. The academic publishers and developers of ORICID will be present
and pose specific questions. In the prior session, Bob Gelman posed a model of these registries as "academic credit bureaus".
David Abrams will share issues related to this characterization. See talks #2 and #3 above.
The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Jones concerns warrantless installation of a GPS receiver on a private automobile. In this session, David will briefly review the history of fourth amendment search cases leading up to Jones, then describe the oral argument followed by the specifics of the three concurring opinions finding the installation in Jones in violation of the fourth amendment. Finally, we will discuss the decision in terms of electronic privacy in the future.
For more information, see http://www.blacklinetracking.com/.
Bio: David Abrams is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and he is the Program Director for the new first-year Problems and Theories course at Harvard Law School. He received degrees in electrical engineering from M.I.T. a while ago and spent twenty-five years designing hardware and software before going to law school. He is interested in the relationship between law and technology, particularly how to apply both effectively to reduce undesirable behavior.
In this session, we will brainstorm on directions for law in the face of today's data collections and sharing
practices and the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Jones on GPS Privacy.
MyDataCan™ seeks to be a long-term publicly available online data service that will
serve as a hub for personal data sharing. Members of the public can collect, assemble,
and distribute their own personal data, across disparate data silos, including health information,
without a fee, and optionally elect to participate in activities that use a person's data to
improve the quality of his life. Most of these activities are third-party applications ("apps")
to which a participant personally subscribes. Participants may also be asked to participate in
research, but no research participation is required. MyDataCan™ is a living lab research
project at Harvard. Research aims are various, but in terms of privacy, include developing and
studying notions of "personal access control" and "privacy-preserving marketplaces"
as mechanisms for data sharing, and assessing privacy and privacy governance when data subjects
directly participate in data sharing arrangements. In this talk, I will introduce the privacy
model of MyDataCan™ and discuss its privacy promise.
For more information, see http://mydatacan.org/.
This talk will present the results of two experiments whose primary
goal was to assess the economic value that people attach to their
private information. The private information considered in the first
experiment was the geographic location of the person, which would be
monitored through a mobile phone. The second experiment focused on
information related to the usage of online communication tools (emails
and instant messaging), which would be collected by a proprietary
monitoring software. In both cases, people were asked to bid for the
remuneration they would require for participating in such an
experiment. We estimated the monetary value of private information in
two general scenarios - data collected for academic research and for
commercial purposes. This work was done together with Marek Kumpost,
Claudia Diaz, Sandra Steinbrecher, George Danezis, Stefan Kopsell and
many others within the EU Network of Excellence FIDIS - Future of
Identity in the Information Society.
Bio: Vashek Matyas is a Fulbright-Masaryk Visiting Scholar at the Center
for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University and
a Professor at the Masaryk University Brno, CZ. His research interests
relate to applied cryptography and security. He worked with Microsoft
Research Cambridge, University College Dublin, Ubilab at UBS AG, and
was a Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cambridge University
Computer Lab. Vashek edited the Computer and Communications Security
Reviews, and worked on the development of Common Criteria and with
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27.
The emergence of the "network public sphere" as a space for political discussion and debate globally is leading to a shift in dialogs about press freedom to dialogs about internet freedom.
The emergence of metrics like Freedom House's Global Assessment of Freedom on the Net raise questions about how we consider the multiple facets of internet freedom and whether these metrics
suffer from the same subjectivities of metrics of press freedom. Ethan Zuckerman will review some of the research on the various restrictions on online speech that are turning the network public sphere into a contested space and suggest possible strategies for data-driven metrics to measure internet censorship and freedom.
Bio: Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages, publishing editions in twenty languages. Through Global Voices and through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he served as a researcher and fellow for eight years, Ethan is active in efforts to promote freedom of expression and fight censorship in online spaces.
The Commerce Department and the White House recently issued a White Paper: "Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework For Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy".
The document proposes a multistakeholder process "to specify how the principles in the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights apply in particular business contexts." Commerce is moving ahead to implement the multistakeholder process. Bob Gellman will review the current state of play in Washington, the proposal for a Consumer Bill of Rights, and the prospects for progress on privacy. One topic for discussion is whether and how academics might play a role in the multistakeholder process.
Robert Gellman is a privacy and information policy consultant in Washington, D.C., specializing in health confidentiality policy, privacy and data protection,
and Internet privacy. Clients have included federal agencies, Fortune 500 companies, trade associations, advocacy groups, foreign governments, and others.
A graduate of the Yale Law School, Gellman served for 17 years as chief counsel to the Subcommittee on Government Information in the House of Representatives.
He maintains a webpage with many documents and other useful resources at www.bobgellman.com. He is coauthor of ONLINE PRIVACY A Reference Handbook published by ABC-CLIO in 2011.