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Privacy

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A Faster Way To Preserve Privacy Online

Searching the internet can reveal information a user would rather keep private. For instance, when someone looks up medical symptoms online, they could reveal their health conditions to Google, an online medical database like WebMD, and perhaps hundreds of these companies’ advertisers and business partners.   For decades, researchers have been crafting techniques that enable users to search for and retrieve information from a database privately, but these methods remain too slow to be effectively used in practice.   MIT researchers have now developed a scheme for private information retrieval that is about 30 times faster than other comparable methods.…
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AI Goes Anonymous During Training To Boost Privacy Protection

Privacy is vital – even more so in the modern era of AI. But AI trained on personal data can be hacked. Even if the hacker doesn’t access the training data, there’s still a risk of leaking sensitive information from the models themselves. For example, it may be possible to reveal if someone’s data is part of the model’s training set, and even infer sensitive attributes about the person, such as salary. We’ve tried to address this privacy issue in our latest work. Our team of researchers from IBM Haifa and Dublin has developed software to help assess privacy risk…
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What The Public Hopes And Fears About The Use Of AI In Health Care

There has been increasing interest in using health “big data” for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As such, it is important to understand which uses of health data are supported by the public and which are not. Previous studies have shown that members of the public see health data as an asset that should be used for research provided there is a public benefit and concerns about privacy, commercial motives and other risks are addressed. However, this general support may not extend to health AI research because of concerns about the potential for AI-related job losses and other negative impacts. Our…
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AI Technologies — Like Police Facial Recognition — Discriminate Against People Of Colour

Detroit police wrongfully arrested Robert Julian-Borchak Williams in January 2020 for a shoplifting incident that had taken place two years earlier. Even though Williams had nothing to do with the incident, facial recognition technology used by Michigan State Police “matched” his face with a grainy image obtained from an in-store surveillance video showing another African American man taking US$3,800 worth of watches. Two weeks later, the case was dismissed at the prosecution’s request. However, relying on the faulty match, police had already handcuffed and arrested Williams in front of his family, forced him to provide a mug shot, fingerprints and…
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How Artificial Intelligence Systems Could Threaten Democracy

U.S. technology giant Microsoft has teamed up with a Chinese military university to develop artificial intelligence systems that could potentially enhance government surveillance and censorship capabilities. Two U.S. senators publicly condemned the partnership, but what the National Defense Technology University of China wants from Microsoft isn’t the only concern. As my research shows, the advent of digital repression is profoundly affecting the relationship between citizen and state. New technologies are arming governments with unprecedented capabilities to monitor, track and surveil individual people. Even governments in democracies with strong traditions of rule of law find themselves tempted to abuse these new…
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