On May 29th there will be a lively debate in Cambridge between people from NGOs and GCHQ, academia and Deepmind, the press and the Cabinet Office. Should governments be able to break the encryption on our phones? Are we entitled to any privacy for our health and social care records? And what can be done … Continue reading Happy Birthday FIPR!
Making security sustainable is a piece I wrote for Communications of the ACM and has just appeared in the Privacy and security column of their March issue. Now that software is appearing in durable goods, such as cars and medical devices, that can kill us, software engineering will have to come of age. The notion … Continue reading Making security sustainable
There has already been serious controversy about the “Henry VIII” powers in the Brexit Bill, which will enable ministers to rewrite laws at their discretion as we leave the EU. Now Theresa May’s government has sneaked a new “Framework for data processing in government” into the Lords committee stage of the new Data Protection Bill … Continue reading End of privacy rights in the UK public sector?
The Economist features face recognition on its front page, reporting that deep neural networks can now tell whether you’re straight or gay better than humans can just by looking at your face. The research they cite is a preprint, available here. Its authors Kosinski and Wang downloaded thousands of photos from a dating site, ran … Continue reading Is this research ethical?
A new study of Palantir’s systems and business methods makes sobering reading for people interested in what big data means for privacy. Privacy scales badly. It’s OK for the twenty staff at a medical practice to have access to the records of the ten thousand patients registered there, but when you build a centralised system … Continue reading Compartmentation is hard, but the Big Data playbook makes it harder still
Today’s newspapers report that the cladding on the Grenfell Tower, which appears to have been a major factor in the dreadful loss of life there, was banned in Germany and permitted in America only for low-rise buildings. It would have cost only £2 more per square meter to use fire-resistant cladding instead. The tactical way … Continue reading Regulatory capture
What happens when your car starts getting monthly upgrades like your phone and your laptop? It’s starting to happen, and the changes will be profound. We’ll be able to improve car safety as we learn from accidents, and fixing a flaw won’t mean spending billions on a recall. But if you’re writing navigation code today … Continue reading When safety and security become one
Now that everyone’s distracted with the supreme court case on Brexit, you can expect the government to sneak out something it’s ashamed of. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has decided to ignore the wishes of over a million people who opted out of having their hospital records given to third parties such as drug companies, and … Continue reading Government U-turn on Health Privacy
Each year we divide our masters of public policy students into teams and get them to write case studies of public policy failures. The winning team this year wrote a case study of the care.data fiasco. The UK government collected personal health information on tens of millions of people who had had hospital treatment in … Continue reading Award-winning case history of the care.data health privacy scandal
Today at 5pm I’ll be giving the Bellwether Lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute. My topic is Big Conflicts: the ethics and economics of privacy in a world of Big Data. I’ll be discussing a recent Nuffield Bioethics Council report of which I was one of the authors. In it, we asked what medical ethics … Continue reading Talk in Oxford at 5pm today on the ethics and economics of privacy in a world of Big Data