Technology in Government (TIG) and Topics in Privacy (TIP)
2/24/2014 refreshments served at 2:30p, discussion 3 to 4pm in room K354, at 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Title: Privacy Implications of Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks With High Resolution
Discussant: Arek Stopczynski
Our capabilities of sensing complex social systems with high resolution have been growing at an unprecedented rate. In the Copenhagen Networks Study, the data, including face-to-face interactions, telecommunication, social networks, location, and background information (personality, demographic, health, politics), is collected from a densely connected population of 1,000 individuals, using state-of-art smartphones as social sensors. Due to the extreme richness of the collected data, high temporal resolution, longitudinal character, and size of the population, protecting the privacy of the participants poses some new and exciting challenges. The talk will include an overview of the privacy challenges the authors of the study encountered - from the technical and operational perspective - as well as implemented solutions.
Bio: Arkadiusz (Arek) Stopczynski is a PhD student at Technical University of Denmark and Visiting Student at MIT Media Lab, Human Dynamics group. Arek's work focuses on building solutions for lage-scale sensing of human systems, including behavioral, psychological, and neurological data, while exploring the privacy practices of data handling, from business, legal, and technical perspectives. Arek is a co-author of a chapter "The New Deal on Data: A Framework for Institutional Controls" in the upcoming book "Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement".