What does Privacy Mean to New Zealanders in the Internet Age

This Thursday is the 1st lecture in the annual Gibbons Memorial lecture series. The first lecture is by Professor Miriam Lips of the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, titled: What does Privacy Mean to New Zealanders in the Internet Age?

When: 6pm (refreshments) for 6.30pm lecture start, Thursday 1st May, 2014
Where: Owen G Glenn Building, Room OGGB3/260-092
Note that there is public parking in the basement of the Owen G Glenn Building at 12 Grafton Road.

Miriam Lips is the first Professor of E-Government at Victoria University of Wellington. This chair is sponsored by industry - Datacom System, FX Networks, Microsoft New Zealand – and the NZ government - the State Services Commission and the Department of Internal Affairs.

Professor Lips holds a MSc and a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and an EMPA from Erasmus University, Leiden University and the Hochschule für Verwaltungswissen-schaften, Speyer. She has held academic positions at the University of Oxford and Tilburg University. Her current research includes management of online identity, use of social media for public engagement, the use of e-campaigning and the use of new media in disaster management.

Synopsis: Based on a 2013 survey with a representative sample of the New Zealand population, this talk will explore how, and to what extent, different groups of the New Zealand population are disclosing and protecting their personal information in varying online relationships with the private sector, government, and family and friends through social networking. The meaning of privacy for people from different age groups, ethnicities, educational backgrounds, and income groups will be discussed, and the implications for a population which increasingly exchanges their identity information online, against the backdrop of new privacy challenges and risks emerging from the use of Big Data.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Keeping Secrets Privacy and Security in the Information Age

As our wonderful Indian Summer draws to an end its time to welcome winter, and for me one of its highlights are the annual series of free public Gibbons Lectures. With the Heartbleed Bug recently in the news alongside the US government mass surveillance of us all, as revealed by Edward Snowden, computer security and privacy has never been more topical. As a consequence this years Gibbons Lectures have the theme Keeping Secrets: Privacy and Security in the Information Age. All of the talks are on Thursdays at 6.30pm, with the public invited from 6pm for free refreshments. The venue is room 260-092 on level-0 of the Owen Glenn building at the University of Auckland on Grafton Road (parking is available under the building.) The schedule is:

1st May: What does Privacy Mean to New Zealanders in the Internet Age?
Professor Miriam Lips
School of Government
Victoria University of Wellington

8th May: Security in Mobile Devices
Dr Giovanni Russello
Department of Computer Science
The University of Auckland

15th May: Public Key Cryptography: Computation, Cash and John Nash
Associate Professor Steven Galbraith
Department of Mathematics
The University of Auckland

22nd May: The Psychology of Computer Insecurity
Dr Peter Gutmann
Department of Computer Science

The University of Auckland

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

via Personal Recipe 895909

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Learning Statistics with Privacy aided by the Flip of a Coin

Posted by Úlfar Erlingsson, Tech Lead Manager, Security Research

(Cross-posted on the Chromium Blog and the Google Online Security Blog)

At Google, we are constantly trying to improve the techniques we use to protect our users security and privacy. One such project, RAPPOR (Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response), provides a new state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving way to learn software statistics that we can use to better safeguard our users’ security, find bugs, and improve the overall user experience.

Building on the concept of randomized response, RAPPOR enables learning statistics about the behavior of users’ software while guaranteeing client privacy. The guarantees of differential privacy, which are widely accepted as being the strongest form of privacy, have almost never been used in practice despite intense research in academia. RAPPOR introduces a practical method to achieve those guarantees.

To understand RAPPOR, consider the following example. Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question “Are you a dog?” in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say “Yes” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.

RAPPOR builds on the above concept, allowing software to send reports that are effectively indistinguishable from the results of random coin flips and are free of any unique identifiers. However, by aggregating the reports we can learn the common statistics that are shared by many users. We’re currently testing the use of RAPPOR in Chrome, to learn statistics about how unwanted software is hijacking users’ settings.

We believe that RAPPOR has the potential to be applied for a number of different purposes, so were making it freely available for all to use. Well continue development of RAPPOR as a standalone open-source project so that anybody can inspect and test its reporting and analysis mechanisms, and help develop the technology. We’ve written up the technical details of RAPPOR in a report that will be published next week at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

We’re encouraged by the feedback we’ve received so far from academics and other stakeholders, and we’re looking forward to additional comments from the community. We hope that everybody interested in preserving user privacy will review the technology and share their feedback at rappor-discuss@googlegroups.com

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