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, […]

In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the privacy research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space. The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the White House BIG DATA: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values Report and the Report to the President on Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective. Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community report, Towards a Privacy Research Roadmap for the Computing Community: Great advances in computing and communication technology are bringing many benefits to society, with transformative changes and financial opportunities being created in health care, transportation, education, law enforcement, national security, […]

The next WATCH Talk is Thursday, March 19, 12:00-1:00PM EDT. Mary Ellen Callahan, will discuss Cybersecurity and Privacy: Complementary– Not Mutually Exclusive– Concepts. Mary Ellen Callahan, Chair of Jenner & Block’s Privacy and Information Governance Practice, has unique and broad experience advising clients at the interface of privacy protection with cybersecurity and national security.  A nationally recognized privacy attorney, she served as Chief Privacy Officer of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2009 until August 2012.  She is a prolific writer and speaker on cutting-edge commercial privacy issues. Abstract   Cybersecurity information sharing is vital to protect the private and public sector assets. With that said, privacy protections must […]

Recently, the world’s top leaders and thinkers gathered for the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. In addition to the great variety of world issues discussed, there were a few discussions on how technology is impacting the economy, laws, and society. Margo Seltzer, a CRA Board Member, traveled to Switzerland for the conference and participated in a panel discussion, “New Cyber World Order,” organized by Harvard University. Since then, the discussion has attracted a lot of attention. While articles in  Digital Journal  and Daily Mail led with the dramatic headline, “Privacy is dead,” Seltzer emphasized to me that the main points conveyed during the session were more practical. Today we share an […]

Last week the New York Times printed an article by John Markoff entitled, Do We Need a New Internet? In the article, Markoff states, “…there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.” Stanford’s Nick McKeown is quoted in the article, “Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet, we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.” The article speculates that in a new network architecture, some users would “give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.” It’s certainly exciting to see core computer […]