PSA Today

Simon Wood is the CEO of Ubisecure, the #1 issuer of LEIs (Legal Entity Identifiers)

We discuss the evolution of LEIs since the financial crisis of 2008, the difference between high assurance and low assurance, and the relationship between rights and ownership as it relates to identity management of entities.  

Seth digresses about NBA Top Shot collectibles, and the role of the NBA in that case as an entity that is tied to the value of the market.

Kaliya wrote this that sheds some additional light on entity identification registries.

Fascinating conversation about the emergence of Synthetic Data and its role in protecting privacy and preserving anonymity in various use cases including finance and advertising.  

Hazy is the most advanced and experienced synthetic data company. We were founded in early 2017 by Harry Keen (CEO), James Arthur (CTO emeritus) and Dr. Luke Robinson (CSO). With one foot in big business and the other in academia, Hazy stands on the belief that privacy by design should not slow down innovation.

Originally a UCL AI spin out, London-based Hazy was initially incubated by Post Urban Ventures and CyLon cybersecurity accelerator. Our startup began trying to fix the flaws of traditional data redaction and then data anonymisation. We soon discovered anonymised data will always pose a risk to re-identification.

We talk homomorphic encryption, synthetic data and the upcoming conference on Thoughtful Biometrics

Matt Prewitt is President of RadicalExchange.org.  He is a lawyer, writer and technologist.

On this episode, we discuss the evolution of RadicalXchange, from the seminal work of Glen Weyl and Eric Posner to the proposal for a Data Freedom Act.  We locate the birth of addiction and exploitation data dynamics in the Persuasive Tech lab of BJ Fogg at Stanford, and think about data coalitions (formerly known as MIDs in Jaron Lanier and Weyls 2018 HBR "A Blueprint for a Better Society") as a progressive alternative.  Note that Kaliya and Seth both contributed to the proposal that has become "The Data Freedom Act"; an appropriate declaration of data rights on this inauguration day.  

You can sign up here to join the RadicalExchange mailing list and participate in monthly calls.

Is there somebody that you think would be great to have on the show?  Maybe you? Please visit www.psatodaypodcast.com and let us know!  

The Right to Privacy. Samuel D. Warren; Louis D. Brandeis. Harvard Law Review, Vol. 4, No. 5. (Dec. 15, 1890), pp. 193-220

The Right to Privacy. Samuel D. Warren; Louis D. Brandeis. Harvard Law Review, Vol. 4, No. 5. (Dec. 15, 1890), pp. 193-220

We talk with Carissa Véliz about her book "Privacy is Power" which was just published in England by Penguin and will be coming out in the US in April.  We talk about privacy as a collective act, the problem with personalized ads, and some of the other thinkers who have inspired her work including Shoshana Zuboff (Surveillance Capitalism), Helen Nissenbaum (Obfuscation) and Thomas Nagel (Concealement and Exposure).  

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, as well as a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the University of Oxford. Véliz has published articles in the Guardian, The New York Times, New Statesman, and the Independent. Her academic work has been published in The Harvard Business Review, Nature Electronics, Nature Energy, and The American Journal of Bioethics, among other journals. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics.

Fun conversation comparing and contrasting the snarky American take on my data (ie https://datalotto.biz/) with the more sober European one (https://online2020.mydata.org/)

Kaliya talks about her new role in helping the self-sovereign Covid credential ecosystem within the Linux community, while Seth reveals his background in avant garde theater and drops references to Jerzy Grotowski and the Wooster Group in talking about the pendulum swinging back towards extreme physical community formation late year.

They talk about Tim Hwang's book on Subprime Attention Crisis 

And look forward to next week's guest Carissa Veliz who wrote Privacy is Power

Adrian Gropper (https://twitter.com/agropper) graduated from MIT in the late 70's and has been a Privacy Engineer ever since.  Along the way he has started a number of ventures in the medical devices space.  He joined us for a fascinating conversation about the evolution of privacy from the late 70's pre-Internet to today's surveillance capitalism regime.  We discuss the need for privacy fiduciaries,  generative layers on top of internet protocols, self-sovereign technologies, human rights, and some of the roads not travelled that led us to the situation we find ourselves in today.  Particular emphasis on the three A's of the security/identity layer:  Authentication, Authorization and Audit.  

Jeff is the founder/current President of Internetbar.org, Inc. Mr. Aresty has been involved in international business law and the role of technology in the transformation of the practice of law for almost three decades. He is a past chair of the American Bar Association Section of International Law’s Information Services, Technology, and Data Protection Committee and is currently the deputy program chair and has volunteered in other capacities for the ABA and the Massachusetts Bar Association.

Also, check out TechforJustice.org

Jeff Doctor is Cayuga from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and a Strategist at Animikii Indigenous Technology. His primary role with the company is ensuring that the experiences we design and develop are effective within Indigenous contexts. His focus is on (re)building Indigenous Data Sovereignty within communities — particularly regarding First Nations lands, housing, and infrastructure. I'm a passionate advocate for leveraging technology to accelerate Indigenous resurgence throughout the world.

Additional links on Jeff and his work:

• https://twitter.com/jeffadoctor
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-doctor/
• https://twitter.com/jeffadoctor/status/1324049553566306305?s=20
• In general this is the best starting point: https://www.gida-global.org
• The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance: https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043/

Katryna Dow from Meeco.me talks about watching Minority Report, talking with Jaron Lanier (who ended up writing this about MIDs - Mediators of Individual Data-- with Glen Weyl) who introduced her to our very own Kaliya nearly a decade ago.  Good clean ethical data fun.

Tim talks about his experience in the field of SSI (Self Sovereign Identity) and his work on the Pan Canadian Trust Framework.  And we learn the differences between working on PSA in a country with modern federal privacy laws like Canada, versus one in the United States where there is no such thing.  We also discuss the example of Google's ill-fated attempt to impose its own brand of surveillance capitalism on Toronto's Sidewalk Lab initiative.

A truly inspiring conversation about Brian's experience at a local city level in Oakland over the past 6 years fighting local surveillance, advocating for privacy, developing anti facial recognition campaigns, and warning about threats like "predictive policing." 

Kaliya welcomes her long-time colleague and frequent collaborator Jim to talk about his history at the front-line of identity management through today.  From the Tru.net site: "In many domains, starting with the COVID-19 crisis, the world literally needs a new way of “thinking together”, a new way of collaboratively engaging in a deliberative process, where content can be traced to its source, information has real accountability, and we can choose what to disseminate across society-at-large. As the realization of the need for this burst into the mainstream, it became clear that a general network solution is needed by all organizations, not just for climate, and Tru was born.

James Felton Keith Campaign Website

The Data Union

Link to the book series on the Data Union site

About the series on the publisher's site: https://www.anthempress.com/anthem-ethics-of-personal-data-collection

Kaliya's Book The Domains of Identity: A Framework for Understanding Identity Systems in Contemporary Society also avail on AMAZON 

Today is July 1, the first day that CCPA is being enforced in California, as well as the launch of Andrew Yang's fascinating DDP (Data Dividend Project).  We think through the implications of both of these and discuss how realistic it is for consumers to see real $ in exchange for their data, and how this might play out in the future.

We start by discussing the latest news about the Senate's on-again off-again attempt to reauthorize Section 215 with an amendment that would prevent the FBI from being able to search our search and browser history without a warrant.  We then welcome Leah Houston, MD, onto the podcast to talk about her journey from Emergency Physician to Medical Privacy Advocate.  Leah is the CEO of HPEC, the Humanitarian Physicians Empowerment Community, which provides doctors with an easy way to organize in a digital space while also maintaining sovereign independence from centralized hierarchy and control.

Caine Tighe, CTO of Privacy Company Duck Duck Go joins us from Montana to talk about the evolution of DDG from search engine to privacy company and educator.  We talk about trust, and how they have managed to build and scale trust over a distributed company of almost 100 people over the past decade.  How consumer attitudes to privacy have shifted.  How they  make money without tracking anybody.  "Serve, dont surveil!" How DDG searches have grown 17% since the start of the pandemic.  Privacy and the emergence of contact tracing.  The future of privacy and anonymity as it relates to password managers, VPNs, and more.  How in the end, it just needs to work for consumers and not become more friction than its worth.  What is at stake with the loss of privacy and how the Snowden revelations was DDG's breakthrough moment.  

Pavel joins us from Europe to discuss what one should, and more importantly what one should not, share about themselves online.  He suggests some very clear action items for all of us in terms of turning off location tracking and auto app refreshes on our iPhones, deleting our social media accounts, and using different fake names for all of our accounts.  He and Seth talk about how they met and came to found Spartacus.  Kaliya updates us on the latest from her Internet Identity Workshop held virtually last week.  And Seth tries to connect the dots between privacy, next generation credit bureaus, private keys and self-sovereign identity.  We refer to this article about "The Scoring of America" that the FTC published in 2014.

Antti Jogi Poikola from MyData joins PSA podcast to talk about his upcoming, comprehensive paper on personal data operators https://mydata-global.org/operator-white-paper.  We talk about balancing fear vs greed when it comes to privacy and personal data monetization, as well as Jogi's own evolution from thinking about data advocacy in terms of privacy towards a more utilitarian perspective.