A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to talk at the 7th Privacy Enhancing Techniques Conference (PET-CON 2017.2) in Hamburg, Germany. It’s a teeny tiny academic event with a dozen or so experts in the field of privacy.
The talks were quite technical, involving things like machine learning over logs or secure multi-party computation. I talked about how I think that the best technical solution does not necessarily enable the people to be more private, simply because the people might not be able to make use of the tool properly. A concern that’s generally shared in the academic community. Yet, the methodology to create and assess the effectiveness of a design is not very elaborated. I guess we need to invest more brain power into creating models, metrics, and tools for enabling people to do safer computing.
So I’m happy to have gone and to have had the opportunity of discussing the issues I’m seeing. Likewise, I find it very interesting to see where the people are currently headed towards.
