Is your data private? Using data while protecting privacy in the digital era
Privacy, does it still matter? What can mobile phone data be used for? How do we safely use big data while moving forward?
This episode of Science & Cocktails is a simultaneously fantastic and terrifying experience that will both raise concerns about your privacy and lead you to understand the human benefits of big data. A talk guided by Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye followed by a performance by Bon Homme, the alter-ego of the singer of WhoMadeWho.
We live in a time when information about most of our movements and actions is collected and stored in real time. Everyone is collecting some type of data from you: your google searches, your online food orders, your holiday locations and the profiles of others you check on Facebook. And the availability of large-scale mobile phone, credit card, browsing history, etc, dramatically increases our capacity to understand and potentially affect the behavior of individuals and collectives.
The use of this data, however, raises legitimate privacy concerns. In this event, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye will discuss how traditional data protection mechanisms fail to protect people's privacy in the age of big data. More specifically, he will show how sensitive information can often be inferred from seemingly innocuous data. He will then discuss some of the socially positive uses of big data and solutions that he and his group is developing at Imperial College London to allow large-scale behavioral data to be used while giving individual strong privacy guarantees.
Afterwards, chilled cocktails that will make you think objectively about big data while Bon Homme, the alter-ego of the vocalist of WhoMadeWho takes the stage. He places himself between sparkling dance pop, driving rhytms and psychadelic electronic sounds, dominated by analogue synthesizers and Tomas' passionate and emotional vocals.
This event is organized with the generous support of Dansk Forening for Persondataret and KPMG Denmark.
Photo: Flickr / r2hox
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
Is your data private? Using data while protecting privacy in the digital era
Privacy, does it still matter? What can mobile phone data be used for? How do we safely use big data while moving forward?
Talk by
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, where he heads the Computational Privacy Group. His research aims at understanding how the unicity of human behavior impacts the privacy of individuals in rich datasets such as mobile phone, credit cards, or browsing data. He was recently named an Innovator under 35 for Belgium. His research has been published in Science and Nature SRep. and covered by the BBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, among others as well as in his TEDx talks
