Everyday Surveillance – The 3rd Privacy, Identity & Data Protection Day 2016 Event

The Web has increased the collection of personal information, and made it even less overt—we have moved from surveillance by watching, to surveillance as tracking, to today’s surveillance by datafication and predictive analyses.

Recent technological developments - such as Big Data, drones, wearable sensors and the Internet of Things – are topics being investigated and discussed by researchers in privacy, identity & data protection, and civil society advocates, alike.

Areas of concern broadly fall into two categories: (1) in relation to the ambit and challenges accompanying state surveillance and law enforcement investigatory powers, and (2) private sector surveillance of web users, such as through covert web activity tracking.

However, these two categories are not mutually exclusive, but blur in practice, as highlighted by the Snowden revelations of 2013 about state surveillance of citizens online through private operators.

Outline of the day

10:15 – 10:30 Arrival & Refreshments

10:30 – 10:35 Welcome & Introduction: Asst. Prof Sophie Stalla-Bourdillion, Head of ILAWs

10:35 – 11.35 Keynote talk, followed by Q&A:

Speaker: Prof Vladan Joler

Title: METADATA INVESTIGATION: INSIDE HACKING TEAM

On July 5, 2015, one of the World’s biggest cyber weapon manufacturers and dealers – an Italian based company, Hacking Team, faced a leak of their internal email database. To make a point of just how intrusive metadata analysis can be, we used substantial amount of metadata we were able to extract from the HT’s published email database and in some kind of reverse engineering process explored the possibility of using analysis methods of intelligence agencies for an independent data investigation. https://labs.rs/en/metadata/

Speaker Information : Vladan Joler is Associate Professor and Chair of New Media Department at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia and the director of the SHARE Foundation, nonprofit organization that is dedicated to protecting the rights of Internet citizens and promoting positive values of openness, decentralization, free access and exchange of knowledge, information and technology. In last 2 years Vladan is leading Share Lab – a research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical aspects of the intersections between technology and society. Share Lab is using various network topology, data mining and data visualization methods to create a unique Internet Privacy and Transparency Atlas, which is a set of visual representations and methodologies created to map, uncover, visualize and independently monitor different aspects of Internet privacy and transparency. https://labs.rs

11.35 – 12:15 Research Presentation Session, followed by Q&A:

Rethinking information architectures to better support end-user control and privacy – Dr Max Van Kleek : As part of the SOCIAM Personal Data & Privacy Lab at Oxford, I would like to both discuss some of our projects. With regard to the short term, our work on Data Terms of Use (DToU) explores the idea giving people control of information in new ways. First, DToU lets people specify how particular pieces of information they post (e.g. tweets, instagrams) get experienced by their audiences. To enable people to control how their info is stored and retained, DToU lets them also state requirements and constraints on the methods of storage and preservation (including by whom, geopolitical constraints and so forth). Finally DToU also enables people to specify how they want to be kept informed about the use and handling of their information item, otherwise known as the provenance trail(s) left by them as they are used and passed from one person to the next.

12:15 – 13:00 Buffet Lunch

13:00 – 13:30 Research Presentation Session, followed by Q&A:

Consentful Agents: Building and evaluating semi-autonomous consent systems – Tim Baarslag & Richard Gomer: The Meaningful Consent in the Digital Economy project has been developing guidelines and technology to make online consent more meaningful. One particular focus, semi-autonomous consent agents, aims to reduce the temporal and cognitive burden that consent places on digital citizens, and at the same time open up new forms of mutually-beneficial data-sharing, by producing agents that can consent, in real time, on citizens' behalf. This work raises new challenges in negotiation and artificial intelligence, but also causes us to fundamentally re-examine what we mean by consent in order to evaluate whether the agents we build are actually any good. In this presentation, we'll explain the agents themselves, the interaction mechanisms that accompany them, and the “consentfulness” metric that will allow us to measure how well they work.

13:30 – 14:25 Open Room Discussion Session

The purpose of this session is to allow the attendees to explore topics around surveillance in an interdisciplinary forum, exchange ideas around research projects and ideas, and seek advice from others present on points of interest. Topics of discussion could include issues as wide as:

• transparency of data processing;
• consentful surveillance and privacy policies design;
• reconfiguring surveillance and the design of systems used for surveillance so as to empower the citizen or contribute to social good;
• definitional distinctions between ‘metadata’ and ‘content data’ / ‘personal data’ and non-personal data in law;
• self and peer surveillance;
• surveillance of the most vulnerable;
• employee surveillance;
• surveillance and activism;
• the anticipated and unanticipated effects of a surveillance culture; and,
• researcher-specific issues around the processing and value of surveillance data.

14:25 – 14:30 Conclusions from the Day: Asst. Prof Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Head of ILAWs

Places are limited. To register, email Alison Knight at A.M.Knight@soton.ac.uk .