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Interdisciplinary Privacy Course 2010
This interdisciplinary course is part of the thematic training of the Leuven Arenberg Doctoral School Training Programme and supported by IAP BCRYPT and LICT. The course is mainly aimed at Ph.D. students from all disciplines (either from the K.U.Leuven or from other universities,) but also open to undergraduate students, post-docs, people working in industry, or anyone else interested on the topic.
The course will provide an overview of various aspects of privacy from the technical, legal, economics, and social science perspectives. While the broad focus of the course is on privacy in electronic services, this year’s edition of the course will have a special focus on social networks.
When
· Wednesday, June 23, from 09:30 to 17:30 · Thursday, June 24, from 09:00 to 18:00
Where
Computer room at the Mediacentre (Faculty of Social Sciences)
Speakers
The course will last two days and consist of eight lectures. The lecturers include five speakers from different departments and faculties in K.U.Leuven and an invited speaker:
· Prof. Alessandro Acquisti, (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
· Prof. Bettina Berendt, Computer Science (K.U.Leuven)
· Dr. Claudia Diaz, Electrical Engineering (K.U.Leuven)
· Dr. David Geerts, Faculty of Social Sciences (K.U.Leuven)
· Seda Gürses, Electrical Engineering / Computer Science (K.U.Leuven)
· Eleni Kosta, Faculty of Law (K.U.Leuven)
Registration
· The course is free of charge, but attendees are required to register by sending an email to claudia.diaz@esat.kuleuven.be
· The registration deadline is: Tuesday, June 15
If you have any questions or would like to know more information please send an email to claudia.diaz@esat.kuleuven.be.
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Programme
Wednesday, June 23
09:30 Introduction (Claudia Diaz)
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Overview of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) (Claudia Diaz)
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Exploring European data protection: From social networks to cookies (Eleni Kosta)
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Privacy and Web mining (Bettina Berendt)
17:30 End
Thursday, June 24
09:00 To share or not to share - a user's perspective on privacy in social networks (David Geerts)
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Privacy Concerns and Information Disclosure: An Illusion of Control Hypothesis (Alessandro Acquisti)
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Privacy, Requirements Engineering and Online Social Network Services (Seda Gürses)
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Predicting Social Security Numbers From Public Data (Alessandro Acquisti)
17:30 Discussion speakers and participants
18:00 end
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Abstracts
Introduction (by Claudia Diaz)
This lecture will motivate the need for privacy protection, introduce the arguments in the privacy debate, and review the main approaches to privacy. Some of the questions that we will address in this talk include: Why is privacy important? Why is it so complex? What are the different meanings of "privacy"? How does "privacy" translate to technical properties and how do these relate to classical security properties? What are the problems of the current legal-policy approach to addressing privacy problems?
Overview of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (by Claudia Diaz)
This lecture will provide a broad overview of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). This will include building blocks such as cryptographic protocols for anonymous and pseudonymous identity management, private information retrieval, data anonymization, and private communication channels, among others. We will explain the main issues that these technologies address, what the current solutions are able to achieve, and which are the remaining open problems. We will also look at how systems can be built following Privacy-by-Design principles, and illustrate this with examples such as Electronic Road Tolling applications.
Exploring European data protection: From social networks to cookies (by Eleni Kosta)
The emergence of a new generation of participatory and collaborative network technologies that provide individuals with a platform for sophisticated online social interaction is already a reality. An increasing number of Internet applications, among which social networks, transform the way in which people communicate and relate to others and to some extent shape society itself. In this lecture the basic data protection rules of the European legal framework will be presented, using the example of social networking as point of reference. In the second part, the lecture will be dedicated to the recent amendments on the European Directive on privacy in electronic communications. The rules relating to cookies and spyware, but also on spam and the recently introduced data breach notification will be presented and analysed.
Privacy and Web mining (by Bettina Berendt)
This lecture will give an overview of Web mining (i.e., data mining applied to Web content, link, or usage data) and its implications for privacy. Bettina Berendt will present examples of techniques that allow various actors to analyse user-related data in order to gain more knowledge about users, and she will discuss how these techniques may endanger unobservability, unlinkability, and/or anonymity. She will show the tradeoff between "threats to privacy" and "opportunities for transparency" that is inherent in the use of data-mining techniques. Based on this, she will investigate the question of whose privacy gets threatened, and give an overview of whose privacy can be protected by methods from fields such as "privacy-preserving data mining" or "privacy-preserving data publishing", with examples from social networks and other types of Web data.
To share or not to share - a user's perspective on privacy in social networks (by David Geerts)
In this lecture, David Geerts will explain how research in Human- Computer Interaction can provide insight into user needs and requirements for privacy. An overview of different user goals relating to privacy will first be presented. The tension between usability and privacy settings will then be discussed, as well as the difference between self-reports from users and observed user behavior. Some solutions from the HCI domain to help users manage their privacy settings will be presented and several pitfalls in designing usable privacy will be illustrated with concrete examples. In the second part of the lecture, David Geerts will look at some specific cases in social media, and how users deal with sharing information (e.g. pictures, location, activities) with different users.
Privacy Concerns and Information Disclosure: An Illusion of Control Hypothesis (by Alessandro Acquisti)
We introduce and test the hypothesis that people may instinctively conflate control over publication of private information with control over accessibility and use of that information by third parties. Borrowing the terminology of psychology and behavioral decision research, we refer to this hypothesis as “illusion of control”. We designed three experiments in the form of online surveys to students at a North-American University, in which we manipulated control over information publication. Our between- subject experiments provide empirical evidence in support of an illusion of control hypothesis in privacy decision making: the control individuals have over the publication of their private information generates an illusion of control over information access and use by others, which consequently decreases their privacy concerns and increases their willingness to publish sensitive information about themselves. When individuals feel less [more] in control over the publication of their information, they may feel they have also less [more] control over the access and use of that information by others (which, in fact, they never had) and, consequently, become less [more] likely to reveal sensitive information. Our findings have both behavioral and policy implications, as they highlight how technologies that give individuals great control on the publication of personal information may create an “illusory” control over the actual access to and usage of that information by others, and paradoxically induce end users to reveal more sensitive information.
Privacy, Requirements Engineering and Online Social Network Services (by Seda Gürses)
Privacy is a debated notion with various definitions and this complicates the process of defining the privacy problem in a system- to-be. The definition of privacy varies not only in its formal abstractions, e.g., in technical privacy solutions, but also in social, academic and legal contexts. The objective of this lecture is to study the process of reconciling the relevant privacy definitions and the (technical) privacy solutions proposed by engineers when building systems in a social context. In particular, we are interested in how this reconciliation can be approached during requirements engineering. Requirements engineering is a sub- phase of software engineering during which the desired behavior of the system-to-be is defined. We will explore methods to define and elicit privacy concerns based on different privacy notions; provide concepts to analyze the resulting privacy requirements from the perspective of different stakeholders, i.e., multilaterally; and propose ways of relating privacy concerns and privacy requirements to privacy solutions. We will provide examples from social networks to illustrate each of these activities.
Predicting Social Security Numbers From Public Data (by Alessandro Acquisti)
I will present the results, and discuss the implications, of a study on the predictability of Social Security numbers (SSNs) recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. In that paper, we demonstrated that Social Security numbers (SSNs) can be accurately predicted from widely available public data, such as individuals' dates and states of birth. Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals' SSNs and their birth data, and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs, thereby heightening the risks of identity theft for millions of US residents. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies, and quantify novel privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums. They also highlight how well-meaning policies in the area of information security can backfire, because of unanticipated interplays between policies and diverse sources of personal data.
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