The End of Privacy?

October 23, 2012 by

Ford Foundation’s Wired for Change Conference
New York, NY | October 23, 2012

As part of Ford Foundation’s Wired for Change conference, noted consumer privacy experts and technologists Harvey Anderson, Brad Burnham, Kamala D. Harris, Jon Leibowitz and I considered how mining Big Data and safeguarding privacy can reasonably coexist, moderated by John Palfrey.

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Hidden in Plain Sight

October 22, 2012 by

How online privacy tools are changing Internet security and driving the (probably quixotic) quest for anonymity in the digital age. By Chris Clayton Delta Sky Magazine | October 22, 2012

[…] Most people have a difficult time with far-off risk,” says Ashkan Soltani, a former technologist with the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division who’s currently a privacy/security researcher and consultant. “That’s why we passed seat belt laws. The likelihood of you getting in a car accident is low, but the harm that you might experience in that accident is potentially high. It’s the same online. We’re bad at figuring out how our data could be used against us in the future, so we don’t care.” […]

Soltani is more optimistic. He sees a future where governments pass stronger digital privacy laws and geeks build easier-to-use privacy controls that work seamlessly with the slobbering puppy version of the Internet we all love. In the meantime, he’s doing his best to educate as many people as possible on the virtues of proper digital hygiene, whether that means using anonymity tools or simply being more aware of the fact that you leave a data trail wherever you go these days.[…]

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Amsterdam Privacy Conference: Behavioural Targeting and Privacy

October 7, 2012 by

Amsterdam Privacy Conference
Amsterdam, The Netherlands | October 7-10, 2012

This interdisciplinary panel brought together leading scholars from Europe and the United States to present and discuss recent research on various aspects of behavioural targeting and privacy. Behavioural targeting is the monitoring of people’s online behaviour over time to use the collected information to target people with advertising matching their inferred interests. Using cookies or other tracking technologies, companies compile detailed profiles based on what internet users read, what videos they watch, what they search for etc. Profiles are enriched with up to date location data of users of mobile devices, data that people submit to websites themselves and other data that are gathered on and off line. As the internet plays an ever-larger role in our lives, the profiles will become ever more detailed. The constant stream of articles in the academic literature and popular press on behavioural targeting illustrates the relevance of the subject, which is high on the agenda of regulators in Europe and the United States.

I was a discussant at this event.

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Data Days: Data Conference and Pioneers

October 1, 2012 by

Berlin, Germany | October 1 and 2, 2012

I was a keynote speaker and panelist at an advertising technology conference in Berlin speaking generally about the problems and opportunities in “big data”.

User data is essentially the raw resource in this industry.  Yet this information doesn’t simply magically appear but is typically collected from users.  These raw materials can essentially be broken up into: 

  1. Information knowingly shared publicly with a site or service.
  2. Information shared via a site/service but intended for another recipient (i.e webmail).
  3. Information collected without the user even being aware.

I highlight how this third category seems to be where most of the privacy tensions stem from, how this data is actually not that useful, and how there’s a huge opportunity in trying to engage the user into providing higher quality ‘consensual’ data (which I dubbed ‘fair trade data’).  Thoughts?

Keynote

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