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 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 protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For this and several other comments, we are deeply grateful to the excellent referees.
Data Protection Directive Art 7(c).
References
Agrawal R, Evfimievski A, Srikant R (2003) Information sharing across private databases. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data. San Diego, California
Aiello B, Ishai Y, Reingold O (2001) Priced oblivious transfer: how to sell digital goods. In B. Pfitzmann (ed.) Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2001. Springer, vol 2045, pp 119–135
Asonov D, Freytag J-C (2003) Almost optimal private information retrieval. In Privacy enhancing technologies, pp 239–243
Bao F, Deng R (2001) Privacy protection for transactions of digital goods. In: Information and communications security, pp 202–213
Bignami F (2007) Privacy and law enforcement in the European union: the data retention directive. Chic J Int Law 8:233–255
Bloustein EJ (1964) Privacy as an aspect of human dignity: an answer to dean prosser. NYUL Rev 39:962
Cachin C (1999) Efficient private bidding and auctions with an oblivious third party. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on computer and communications security. ACM, pp 120–127
Cristofaro E, et al (2009) Privacy-preserving policy-based information transfer. Proceedings of the PETS ‘09: 9th international symposium on privacy enhancing technologies. Seattle, WA, pp 164–184
Du W, Atallah MJ (2001) Privacy-preserving cooperative scientific computations. Privacy-preserving cooperative scientific computations. csfw vol 1, p. 273
Frikken KB, Atallah MJ (2003) Privacy preserving electronic surveillance. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 2003 ACM workshop on privacy in the electronic society, Washington, DC
Goldwasser S, Lindell Y (2002) Secure computation without agreement. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 16th international conference on distributed computing
Howe DC, Nissenbaum H (2009) TrackMeNot: resisting surveillance in web search. In: Kerr IR et al (eds) Lessons from the identity trail: anonymity, privacy, and identity in a networked society. Oxford University Press, pp 417–436
Iliev A, Smith SW (2005) Protecting client privacy with trusted computing at the server. IEEE Secur Priv 3:20–28
Kaliski (2003) RSA problem. In ACM SIGKDD explorations: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 10
Kwecka Z, Buchanan W, Spiers D, Saliou L (2008) Validation of 1-N OT algorithms in privacy-preserving investigations. Paper presented at the 7th European conference on information warfare and security, University of Plymouth
Laurie G, Sethi N (2013) Towards principles-based approaches to governance of health-related research using personal data. Eur J Risk Regul 1:43–57
Lawless MD (2007) The third party doctrine redux: Internet search records and the case for a” Crazy Quilt” of fourth amendment protection. UCLA JL & Tech. 2–6
Menezes AJ, Van Oorschot PC, Vanstone SA (2010) Handbook of applied cryptography. CRC press
Ostrovsky R, Skeith WE III (2007) A survey of single-database PIR: techniques and applications. In: Tatsuaki O, Xiaoyun W (eds) Public key cryptography, vol 4450. Springer, Berlin, pp 393–411
Raab C (2012) Privacy, social values and the public interest. Politische Vierteljahresschrift 46:129–152
Rasmussen Reports (2008) 51% Say security more important than privacy. Retrieved 01/09/2009, from http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/general_current_events/51_say_security_more_important_than_privacy
Regan PM (1994) Legislating privacy: technology, social values and public policy. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
Rivest RL, Shamir A, Adleman L (1978) A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Commun ACM 21(2):120–126
Schneier B (1995) Applied cryptography: protocols, algorithms, and source code in C. Wiley
Shamir A (1980) On the power of commutativity in cryptography. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 7th colloquium on automata, languages and programming
Shannon C (1949) Communication theory of secrecy systems. Bell Syst Tech J 28
Simitis S (1987) Reviewing privacy in an information society. Univ PA Law Rev 135(3):707–746
Solove DJ (2013) Privacy self-management and the consent dilemma. Harv L Rev 126:1879–2139
Tene O (2008) What Google knows: privacy and internet search engines. Utah L Rev, pp 1433–1492
Weis SA (2006) New foundations for efficient authentication, commutative cryptography, and private disjointness testing. Unpublished PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Wicks P et al (2010) Sharing health data for better outcomes on PatientsLikeMe. J Med Internet Res 12:2
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kwecka, Z., Buchanan, W., Schafer, B. et al. “I am Spartacus”: privacy enhancing technologies, collaborative obfuscation and privacy as a public good. Artif Intell Law 22, 113–139 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9155-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-014-9155-5