Posts Tagged - data protection

Abstract

Artificial intelligence systems have become ubiquitous in everyday life, and their potential to improve efficiency in a broad range of activities that involve finding patterns or making predictions have made them an attractive technology for the humanitarian sector. However, concerns over their intrusion on the right to privacy and their possible incompatibility with data protection principles may pose a challenge to their deployment.

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Abstract

Building on the growing literature in algorithmic accountability, this paper investigates the use of a process visualisation technique known as the Petri net to achieve the aims of Privacy by Design. The strength of the approach is that it can help to bridge the knowledge gap that often exists between those in the legal and technical domains. Intuitive visual representations of the status of a system and the flow of information within and between legal and system models mean developers can embody the aims of the legislation from the very beginning of the software design process, while lawyers can gain an understanding of the inner workings of the software without needing to understand code. The approach can also facilitate automated formal verification of the models’ interactions, paving the way for machine-assisted privacy by design and, potentially, more general ‘compliance by design’. Opening up the ‘black box’ in this way could be a step towards achieving better algorithmic accountability.

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Abstract

In order to address the continued decline in consumer trust in all things digital, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), we propose a radical overhaul of IoT design processes. Privacy by Design has been proposed as a suitable framework, but we argue the current approach has two failings: it presents too abstract a framework to inform design, and it is often applied after many critical design decisions have been made in defining the business opportunity. To rebuild trust we need the philosophy of Privacy by Design to be transformed into a wider Social Impact Assessment and delivered with practical guidance to be applied at product/service concept stage as well as throughout the system’s engineering.

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Presented at BILETA 2016, University of Hertfordshire, where it won the Google Award for Best Postgraduate Paper. It was later published as Opening the Black Box: Petri Nets and Privacy by Design.

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