“I am Spartacus”: privacy enhancing technologies, collaborative obfuscation and privacy as a public good

Kwecka, Zbigniew; Buchanan, William J; Schafer, Burkhard; Rauhofer, Judith

Abstract

The paper introduces an approach to privacy enhancing technologies that sees privacy not merely as an individual right, but as a public good. This understanding of privacy has recently gained ground in the debate on appropriate legal protection for privacy in an online environment. The jurisprudential idea that privacy is a public good and prerequisite for a functioning democracy also entails that its protection should not be left exclusively to the individual whose privacy is infringed. This idea finds its correspondence in our approach to privacy protection through obfuscation, where everybody in a group takes a small privacy risk to protect the anonymity of fellow group members. We show how these ideas can be computationally realised in an Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP). IDAP is an efficient symmetric Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Feb 6, 2014
• Publication Date: 2014-06
• Deposit Date: Nov 5, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 6, 2014
• Journal: Artificial Intelligence and Law
• Print ISSN: 0924-8463
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8382
• Publisher: BMC
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 113-139
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9155-5
• Keywords: Privacy enhancing technologies; Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP); Private Information Retrieval (PIR)
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/6465
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9155-5
• Contract Date: Nov 5, 2013