Abstract

Ed Felten: Reconciling Public Policy with New Theories of Privacy

Most laws and public policies on privacy are based on an outdated and unsound theory of privacy, relying on notions of personally identifiable information (PII). Although the problems of the PII model have been increasingly recognized by policymakers, there is currently no theory that can plausibly replace PII in the policymaking process. This talk will discuss what is missing, and what researchers can do to help close this gap and build a foundation for more sound and effective public policy.

Simson Garfinkel: More Privacy to Formalize

Differential privacy provides a formal definition of data privacy within a database, but experience has shown that it's hard to apply differential privacy beyond structured sets of tabular data and some limited graph databases.  However, there are many kinds of information that require sharing and computation. Simple datatypes include time, geographical, and imagery information. How do you privatize a picture of a crowd? Today practitioners are at a loss for privatizing even many kinds of structured information, such as 3D models or genetic information.  In the cybersecurity world, there is a need to privatize netflow data, cyber threat intelligence, and provenance.  And then there's text. Even if the world of tabular databases, we still lack tools for applying differential privacy to high-dimensional data. Differential privacy doesn't seem to have a concept of group privacy. Finally, while differential privacy does give us tools for private data publishing, it is silent on the privacy of data users. 
 
Simson Garfinkel will present a slide for each of these examples, discussing how it would be really neat to privatize this kind of data, but no recommendations on how to addresses these open problems.
 

Frauke Kreuter: Data Collection, Privacy, Consent and Bias

No abstract available

Nina Taft: Privacy Advisor and Incentivizing Privacy-responsible Behavior

No abstract available