Contributions to this post were provided by Monica Lam and Jen King from Stanford University.  The New York Times recently published an article titled Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative. Professor Monica Lam and her students, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Mehrad Moradshahi, have developed a virtual assistant called Almond that can avoid surrendering personal information to a centralized service and encourage open competition among companies. She is joined by Stanford computer science researchers Michael Bernstein, Dan Boneh,  Jen King, James Landay, Chris Manning, and David Mazières, Chris Re in a newly funded NSF research grant to expand the capabilities and privacy protection […]

The National Privacy Research Strategy by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD) has been released!  The National Privacy Research Strategy calls for research in science and engineering that will enable the U.S. to benefit from innovative data use while protecting privacy. Research agencies from across the government participated in the development of the strategy, reviewing existing Federal research activities in privacy-enhancing technologies, soliciting inputs from the private sector, and identifying priorities for privacy research funded by the Federal Government. In May 2015, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the privacy research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic […]

The Privacy by Design four workshop series is well underway. With two workshops completed and two to come, the community engagement is high and the interest is continuing to grow. The first workshop, State of Research and Practice, was held in early February and the report can be found here. The second workshop, Privacy Enabling Design, was held in Atlanta, GA in early May. The report has now been released and a number of key insights came out of the two day discussion: Designers lack adequate heuristics to follow when designing applications that may affect users’ privacy. Users want modular privacy for different personal relationships. Designing for trust is a good framework, […]