Communications Seminar

Title:  Transactional Privacy: Unknotting the Privacy Tussle with Economics

Speaker:  Prof. Augustin Chaintreau

Dept. of Computer Science

Columbia University

Date:  Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Time:  4:00 p.m.

Location:  301 Coordinated Science Lab

Abstract:  Personal data has become the hottest commodity on the Internet - the "new oil" of the Web. Taking a step back, it is indeed an invaluable resource of public concern: Information collected in social media potentially offers unprecedented knowledge on human behaviors and our collective actions, with immediate outcomes on development, health, energy and other public decisions. Unfortunately, merely accessing most of this sensitive data is today's most vexing challenge for many scientists, while users express increasing concerns on the way this information is collected and used. In fact, many researchers are now engaged in a privacy tussle, offering online tools counteracting commercial interests to prevent today's unregulated, and increasingly harmful, personal data collection.

In this talk, we argue that a more pragmatic, albeit ambitious, approach is needed, through an economic rethink of the monetization of personal data. We propose Transactional Privacy, a new concept that protects user's control of their data along with the economic interest they are entitled to claim, as a natural complement to privacy preserving schemes. It is instantiated in an information market architecture centered on personal data transactions. Our preliminary results indicate that Transactional Privacy is feasible within today's communication architecture, can protect users and companies against various forms of cheating, and offers one of the first plausible answer to the difficult deployment of privacy preserving schemes.

Biography:  Augustin Chaintreau is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research, by experience in industry, is centered on real world impact and emerging computing trends, while his training, in mathematics and theoretical computer science, is focused on guiding principles. He designed and proved the first reliable, scalable and network-fair multicast architecture while working at IBM during his Ph.D. He conducted the first measurement experience of human mobility as a communication transport tool while working for Intel and, as member of the Technical Staff of Technicolor (formerly, Thomson), showed that opportunistic caching in mobile networks can optimally take advantage of social properties. He is now working on internetworking social network services through distributed algorithms and opportunistic architecture, to vastly expand how your data and the web deal with everyday objects and your social environment.

An ex student of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science in 2006. He has been an active member of the networking research community, serving in the program committee of ACM SIGCOMM, ACM CoNEXT, ACM SIGMETRICS, ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, ACM IMC, IEEE Infocom. He is also an area editor for IEEE TMC, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, ACM SIGMOBILE MC2R.