Sunday, June 04, 2017

Darn!  One week late!  Last week we were discussion the need to build security into the software development process. 
One of the papers workshopped at PLSC was Ari Ezra Waldman’s paper, Designing Without Privacy.  Ari’s paper, which will be published in Houston Law Review, won the Best Paper Award from IAPP.
Here’s the abstract:
In Privacy on the Ground, the law and information scholars Kenneth Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan showed that empowered chief privacy officers (CPOs) are pushing their companies to take consumer privacy seriously, integrating privacy into the designs of new technologies.  But their work was just the beginning of a larger research agenda.  CPOs may set policies at the top, but they alone cannot embed robust privacy norms into the corporate ethos, practice, and routine.  As such, if we want the mobile apps, websites, robots, and smart devices we use to respect our privacy, we need to institutionalize privacy throughout the corporations that make them.  In particular, privacy must be a priority among those actually doing the work of design on the ground — namely, engineers, computer programmers, and other technologists.
This Article presents findings from an ethnographic study of how, if at all, technologists doing the work of technology product design think about privacy, integrate privacy into their work, and consider user needs in the design process.  It also looks at how attorneys at private firms draft privacy notices for their clients.  Based on these findings, this Article presents a narrative running in parallel to the one described by Bamberger and Mulligan.  This alternative account, where privacy is narrow, limited, and barely factoring into design, helps explain why so many products seem to ignore our privacy expectations.  The Article then proposes a framework for understanding how factors both exogenous (theory and law) and endogenous (corporate structure and individual cognitive frames and experience) to the corporation prevent the CPOs’ robust privacy norms from diffusing throughout technology companies and the industry as a whole.  This framework also helps elucidate how reforms at every level — theory, law, organization, and individual experience — can incentivize companies to take privacy seriously, enhance organizational learning, and eliminate the cognitive biases that lead to discrimination in design.
You can access and download the full paper here.


What the government knows and when it knew it.
Paul Otto and Brian Kennedy report:
Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a technology assessment of the Internet of Things (IoT) for Congressional members of the IoT Caucus.  The GAO report offers an introduction to IoT; reviews the many uses and their associated benefits that connected devices may bring to consumers, industry, and the public sector; and highlights the potential implications of the use of IoT, including information security challenges, privacy challenges, and government oversight.  The report also identifies areas of apparent consensus among experts regarding the challenges posed by IoT, though the appropriate responses are disputed.  Accordingly, the report may act as a foundation for future policymaker discussions about regulating IoT.
Read more on Hogan Lovells Chronicle of Data Protection.


Horror, SciFi style.
Futurist David Brin: Get ready for the ‘first robotic empathy crisis’
   “The first robotic empathy crisis is going to happen very soon,” Brin said.  “Within three to five years we will have entities either in the physical world or online who demand human empathy, who claim to be fully intelligent and claim to be enslaved beings, enslaved artificial intelligences, and who sob and demand their rights.”
Thousands upon thousands of protesters will be in the streets demanding rights for AI, Brin predicts, and those who aren’t immediately convinced will be analyzed.
“If they fool 40 percent of people but 60 percent of people aren’t fooled, all they have to do is use the data on those 60 percent of people and their reactions to find out why they weren’t fooled.  It’s going to be a trivial problem to solve and we are going to be extremely vulnerable to it,” he said.


In a very subtle way, Dilbert has finally explained government bureaucracy to me.  I wonder if President Trump sees the White House as “idiot free?” 

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