Weâre probably surveilling poor and vulnerable people in developing and developed countries too much in the name of aiding them, and we should give stronger consideration to the privacy rights of aid recipients. Personal data about these people collected for benign purposes can be weaponized against them by malicious actors, and surveillance itself can deter people from accessing vital services.
Interesting op-ed! I wonder to what extent these issues are present in work being done by EA-endorsed global health charities; my impression is that almost all of their work happens outside of the conflict zones where some of these privacy concerns are especially potent. It also seems like these charities are very interested in reaching high levels of usage/âlocal acceptance, and would be unlikely to adopt policies that deter recipients unless fraud concerns were very strong. But I donât know all the Top Charities well enough to be confident of their policies in this area.
This would be a question worth asking on one of GiveWellâs occasional Open Threads. And if you ask it on Rob Matherâs AMA, youâll learn how AMF thinks about these things (given Robâs response times, possibly within a day).
Thank you for sharing this! I took a class on surveillance and privacy last semester, so I already have basic knowledge about this subject. I agree that itâs important to reject false tradeoffs. Personally, my contribution to this area would be in formulating a theory of privacy that can be used to assess surveillance schemes in this context.
Shafi Goldwasser at Berkeley is currently working on some definitions of privacy and their applicability for law. See this paper or this talk. In a talk she gave last month she talked about how to formalize some aspects of law related to cryptographic concepts to formalize âthe right to be forgottenâ. The recording is not up yet, but in the meantime I paste below my (dirty/âpartial) notes from the talk. I feel somewhat silly for not realizing the possible connection there earlier, so thanks for the opportunity to discover connections hidden in plain sight!
Shafi is working directly with judges, and this whole program is looking potentially promising. If you are seriously interested in pursuing this, I can connect you to her if that would help. Also, we have someone in our research team at EA Israel doing some work into this (from a more tech/âcrypto solution perspective) so it may be interesting to consider a collaboration here.
The notes-
âWhat Crypto can do for the Law?ââShafi Goldwasser 30.12.19:
There is a big language barrier between Law and CS, following a knowledge barrier.
People in law study the law of governing algorithms, but there is not enough participation of computer scientists to help legal work.
But, CS can help with designing algorithms and formalizing what these laws should be.
Shafi suggests a crypto definition for âThe right to be forgottenâ. This should help
Privacy regulation like CCPA and GDPR have a problemâhow to test whether one is compliant?
Do our cryptographic techniques satisfy the law?
that requires a formal definition
A first suggestion:
after deletions, the state of the data collector and the history of the interaction with the environment should be similar as to the case where information was never changed. [this is clearly inadequateâShafi aims at starting a conversation]
Application of cryptographic techniques
History Oblivious Data Structure
Data Summarization using Differential Privacy leaves no trace
Weâre probably surveilling poor and vulnerable people in developing and developed countries too much in the name of aiding them, and we should give stronger consideration to the privacy rights of aid recipients. Personal data about these people collected for benign purposes can be weaponized against them by malicious actors, and surveillance itself can deter people from accessing vital services.
âStop Surveillance Humanitarianismâ by Mark Latonero
Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks makes a similar argument regarding aid recipients in developed countries.
Interesting op-ed! I wonder to what extent these issues are present in work being done by EA-endorsed global health charities; my impression is that almost all of their work happens outside of the conflict zones where some of these privacy concerns are especially potent. It also seems like these charities are very interested in reaching high levels of usage/âlocal acceptance, and would be unlikely to adopt policies that deter recipients unless fraud concerns were very strong. But I donât know all the Top Charities well enough to be confident of their policies in this area.
This would be a question worth asking on one of GiveWellâs occasional Open Threads. And if you ask it on Rob Matherâs AMA, youâll learn how AMF thinks about these things (given Robâs response times, possibly within a day).
Related: https://ââwww.effectivealtruism.org/ââarticles/ââea-global-2018-the-future-of-surveillance/ââ
Thank you for sharing this! I took a class on surveillance and privacy last semester, so I already have basic knowledge about this subject. I agree that itâs important to reject false tradeoffs. Personally, my contribution to this area would be in formulating a theory of privacy that can be used to assess surveillance schemes in this context.
Shafi Goldwasser at Berkeley is currently working on some definitions of privacy and their applicability for law. See this paper or this talk. In a talk she gave last month she talked about how to formalize some aspects of law related to cryptographic concepts to formalize âthe right to be forgottenâ. The recording is not up yet, but in the meantime I paste below my (dirty/âpartial) notes from the talk. I feel somewhat silly for not realizing the possible connection there earlier, so thanks for the opportunity to discover connections hidden in plain sight!
Shafi is working directly with judges, and this whole program is looking potentially promising. If you are seriously interested in pursuing this, I can connect you to her if that would help. Also, we have someone in our research team at EA Israel doing some work into this (from a more tech/âcrypto solution perspective) so it may be interesting to consider a collaboration here.
The notes-
âWhat Crypto can do for the Law?ââShafi Goldwasser 30.12.19:
There is a big language barrier between Law and CS, following a knowledge barrier.
People in law study the law of governing algorithms, but there is not enough participation of computer scientists to help legal work.
But, CS can help with designing algorithms and formalizing what these laws should be.
Shafi suggests a crypto definition for âThe right to be forgottenâ. This should help
Privacy regulation like CCPA and GDPR have a problemâhow to test whether one is compliant?
Do our cryptographic techniques satisfy the law?
that requires a formal definition
A first suggestion:
after deletions, the state of the data collector and the history of the interaction with the environment should be similar as to the case where information was never changed. [this is clearly inadequateâShafi aims at starting a conversation]
Application of cryptographic techniques
History Oblivious Data Structure
Data Summarization using Differential Privacy leaves no trace
ML Data Deletion
The talk is here