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

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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.

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Notes

  1. http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/4437/.

  2. For this and several other comments, we are deeply grateful to the excellent referees.

  3. Data Protection Directive Art 7(c).

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Correspondence to Burkhard Schafer.

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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

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