There are over one hundred colleges and universities in the greater Boston area. With a T stop just a mile from campus, it’s incredibly easy to get to conferences, speeches, and symposia at other institutions. I’m not just saying this; I’ve actually done it! Last Friday, I went to the Fourth Annual Symposium on the Future of Computation in Science and Engineering at Harvard.
I heard about this conference from Ming Chow, who taught my computer systems security class last year. He runs an online message board where he posts job and internship listings, symposium announcements, and similar items for anyone interested in computer science. I largely stopped paying attention to it when I accepted a full-time job offer, but the topic of this symposium jumped out at me: “Privacy in a Networked World.”
Six different speakers discussed their views on whether or not society needs to develop a new definition of privacy as the world in which we live becomes increasingly connected. Edward Snowden (yes, that Edward Snowden) participated via video and discussed how encryption can still be successfully used to keep your data private. Apparently, the NSA hasn’t broken the standard encryption algorithms; in some cases, they have found ways around encryption to find the unencrypted version of whatever you’re trying to keep private. Hurray…?
John Wilbanks, the Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, described how he is working to change informed consent for individuals participating in large clinical research studies. Collecting the scientific data necessary to make meaningful observations is impossible while also guaranteeing the absolute anonymity of everyone participating. He wants to change privacy laws regarding patient health data to allow this kind of research to occur, and make sure patients are aware of what this means with regards to their personal information.
Betsy Masiello, a Senior Manager of Global Public Policy at Google, spoke about how Google is working to improve the privacy and security of user data. Google is moving toward using the secure and encrypted HTTPS protocol everywhere, which prevents someone who is spying on your web traffic from seeing what you’re Googling or watching on YouTube. She also verified that Google only gives user data to government entities when it has been legally requested, and that the NSA does not have back doors into Google data centers.
Videos from all the speakers at the symposium should be posted online by the end of the week. The Edward Snowden video is actually already live. If this interests you as much as it interests me, watch one and tell me what you think in the comments!