The privacy bounds of human behavior — Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye (MIT & Imperial College)
We're living in an age of big data, a time when most of our movements and actions are collected and stored in real time. Large-scale mobile phone, credit card, or browsing datasets dramatically increase our capacity to measure, understand, and potentially affect the behavior of individuals and collectives. The use of this data, however, raise legitimate privacy concerns. In this talk, I will first show how the mere absence of obvious identifiers such as name or phone number is often not enough to prevent re-identification. I will then discuss how, as the use of this data progress, it will become increasingly important to consider whether sensitive information can be inferred from apparently innocuous data. Finally, I will discuss the impact of metadata on society and some of solutions we have been developing to allow metadata to be used in a privacy-conscientious way.
Couldn't attend PAPIs '16? Get access to the other presentations' slides and videos at https://gumroad.com/products/fehon/