Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye , Erez Shmueli , Samuel S. Wang, and Alex Sandy Pentland , have published openPDS: Protecting the Privacy of Metadata through SafeAnswers , PLOS ONE , 9(7), e98790 (2014), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098790
Here is the abstract:
The rise of smartphones and web services made possible the large-scale collection of personal metadata. Information about individuals’ location, phone call logs, or web-searches, is collected and used intensively by organizations and big data researchers. Metadata has however yet to realize its full potential. Privacy and legal concerns, as well as the lack of technical solutions for personal metadata management is preventing metadata from being shared and reconciled under the control of the individual. This lack of access and control is furthermore fueling growing concerns, as it prevents individuals from understanding and managing the risks associated with the collection and use of their data. Our contribution is two-fold: (1) we describe openPDS, a personal metadata management framework that allows individuals to collect, store, and give fine-grained access to their metadata to third parties. It has been implemented in two field studies; (2) we introduce and analyze SafeAnswers, a new and practical way of protecting the privacy of metadata at an individual level. SafeAnswers turns a hard anonymization problem into a more tractable security one. It allows services to ask questions whose answers are calculated against the metadata instead of trying to anonymize individuals’ metadata. The dimensionality of the data shared with the services is reduced from high-dimensional metadata to low-dimensional answers that are less likely to be re-identifiable and to contain sensitive information. These answers can then be directly shared individually or in aggregate. openPDS and SafeAnswers provide a new way of dynamically protecting personal metadata, thereby supporting the creation of smart data-driven services and data science research.
Background on this paper is available from a post at MIT News .
Click here for other posts about openPDS .
HT @FuturICT
IATE: Inter-Active Terminology for Europe , which contains a very large set of legal terms in many languages, is now available for download.
One access point is the EU Open Data Portal: http://ift.tt/1qY3bYh
The main Website is at: http://iate.europa.eu/
The download page is at: http://ift.tt/1qY3bYg
The search interface is at: http://ift.tt/1xWyq6F
Here is the description, from the Website:
IATE stands for InterActive Terminology for Europe. It’s the shared terminology database of the institutions of the European Union. Its main aim is to facilitate the task of the translators working for the EU, but will hopefully also be useful for other EU staff and for the public in general. [...]
The domain classification system used for IATE entries is the EuroVoc thesaurus. [...]
There are at present about 8.6 million terms in IATE, distributed through approximately 1.4 million entries. [...]
IATE is the shared responsibility of all EU institutions and bodies involved in the project (European Parliament, Council of the EU, Commission, Court of Justice, Court of Auditors, European Economic and Social Committee, Committee of the Regions, European Central Bank, European Investment Bank, Translation Centre), and is hosted by the European Commission in Luxembourg. [...]
HT @cottinstef and @wordlo (here and here)
The submission deadline has been extended and the venue has been changed for LVI 2014 Africa: Law via the Internet Conference , being held 30 September-1 October 2014.
The extended submission deadline for abstracts is 31 July 2014.
The venue has been changed to Cape Town, South Africa.
Here are excerpts from the call for paper:
[...] Topics: Submission of papers is invited on topics including but not limited to the following:
- Building economically sustainable Legal Information Institutes
- Electoral management, politics and policy making through technology and web based applications
- Open data platforms
- Open access to legal information: impacts and effects
- The promise and reality of e-participation
- Success stories and case studies in open access to legal information
- Mobile access & Africa – Frog Leaping through the desktop age
- Making legal information accessible and useful
- Making accessibility and usefulness a reality for citizens
- Semantic Web
- Engaging or disseminating legal information? The power of blogs / forums
- Universally Accessible Laws: A dream or reality?
- Multi-lingual databases
- Plain Language Movement: Enhancing access to law without altering / replacing the intended meaning
- Legal Informatics: Analysing available legal data and interpreting the results
- Open access to law in developing countries, challenges and opportunities
- Emerging trends of access to legal information
- Enhancing Access to legal information using Creative Commons
- Social media and its implication to free access to legal information
- Role of the Legal Information Institutes (LII’s) in economic development
- Transforming legal process through technology: the reality, the possibility, the promise
Abstracts on other aspects of law via the Internet are also welcome. Abstracts purely on ‘cyber law’ or ‘internet law’ will not be accepted unless they relate directly to free access to law on the Internet. Abstracts should raise issues of theoretical or practical interest to others who are developing or using internet-based law resources. [...]
For more details, please see the complete call for papers.
