Technology in Government (TIG) and Topics in Privacy (TIP)
5/19/2014 2:30 - 3pm refreshments, discussion 3- 4pm in room K354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Title: Healthcare Privacy and Intellectual Property Rights Protection with Accountable Systems
Discussant: Oshani Seneviratne, MIT
I will describe an infrastructure that enables data transparency and accountability on appropriate usages of data. This infrastructure is encapsulated in a web protocol called HTTPA (HTTP with Accountability) and powered by the decentralized Provenance Tracking Network (PTN). HTTPA enables data consumers and data producers to agree to specific usage restrictions, while the PTN is used to preserve the provenance of data transferred from one entity to another. Using this infrastructure, the data subject can derive an audit trail for a data item and determine if there has been any usage restriction violations. We have evaluated the protocol with two reference accountable systems implementations: (1) Transparent Health: an electronic healthcare records system for patients to mark data items as sensitive and determine the access and usage of those data items, and (2) PhotoRM: a decentralized photo sharing and editing application that allows a content creator to see how her content has been reused on the Web.
Bio: Oshani is a PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL advised by Tim Berners-Lee. Her research is on social systems on the Web augmented with provenance, policy expressions and Linked Data. She is also working on using MIT App Inventor to make disaster management applications. For more information, please see: http://people.csail.mit.edu/oshani/