Intercept Reporting Raises Broader Metadata Minimization Question
By Jennifer Granick on August 25, 2014 at 12:00 am
Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.
By Jennifer Granick on August 25, 2014 at 12:00 am
By Ryan Calo on August 15, 2014 at 11:32 pm
In a recent op-ed, author Evgeny Morozov claims that we tend to think of privacy in terms of control over personal information rather than power or influence. “The privacy debate, incapacitated by misplaced pragmatism, defines privacy as individual control over information flows,” writes Morozov. Instead we should be thinking of how and why powerful institutions use data to nudge us toward their own economic and political ends. Read more about Everyone Knows Privacy Is About Power. Now What?
By Gail Kent on July 26, 2014 at 3:08 am
It’s not straightforward being a law enforcement officer in the UK in 2014. I often think of how different my working existence is to that of my great-grandfather, also in law enforcement, but working in a small Scottish village in the late 19th Century. The highlight of Constable Taylor’s 30-year career was once catching a burglar. Read more about Reflections on the UK's DRIP Act
By Brian Hayden Pascal on July 10, 2014 at 12:56 pm
There's an old joke that goes like this: “There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.” Like most old jokes, it's built around a kernel of truth. If you cram enough training in mathematics and science into a person's brain, it changes not just how they think, but how they see the world. It's hard to overstate just how deep this shift goes, but it's akin to the “overview effect” experienced by astronauts during spaceflight, in which suddenly seeing the planet from a different perspective induces a profound sense of oneness and connection. But for engineers and other types of data scientists, I suspect that the effect goes in the opposite direction. It seems like there's an inclination among some who work with large bodies of data, be they NSA cryptologists or Facebook researchers, to view their data as something separate from the individual citizens and consumers that those data points represent. And I believe that this disconnection goes a long way towards explaining the tensions in the modern big data world. Read more about Big Data and the Perceptual Divide