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PORTIA at NYU focuses on social, political, and ethical
aspects of the collection, storage, analysis, and distribution
of sensitive information about people.
Project Team: Dr. Helen Nissenbaum (director),
Timothy Weber, Michael Zimmer, Rachel Aridor, and Maja Petric
PORTIA
is a large National Science Foundation ITR
grant to study technical, social, and institutional
issues surrounding sensitive information in a wired world.
PORTIA is aimed at collaborating the insights of academics,
policy advocates, industry representatives, and information
user communities.
Projects:
Privacy as Contextual Integrity
Lead Researcher: Dr. Helen Nissenbaum
Contextual Integrity is not a theory of privacy, but a search
for a systematic way to address problems, conflicts, and anxieties
stirred by the development and uses of information technologies in
gathering, storing, analyzing, sharing, and using information about
people. Contexts can be grasped at a certain level of analysis - that
of the societal, institutional, and/or cultural. We are not interacting
with one another simply as individuals (singly or in groups) but almost
always in particular stereotypical situations, acting in certain capacities.
(E.g. at work, with friends, in a family, physicians office, restaurant,
voting, shopping, church, school) - such situations might be called contexts.
Contexts are governed by norms, or rules; some of the norms cover information
about people. I will call these informational norms. Contextual Integrity is
maintained (respected) when informational norms are followed and upheld.
Selected Works
Privacy as Contextual Integrity (pdf). Washington Law Review, v79 #1, February 04,
2004. 119-158.
Privacy in Context,
Texas A & M Talk, February 2005 (PPT Slides)
Information and the U.S. Census
Lead Researcher: Timothy Weber
With a legal history dating from the Constitution and as a
context in which participants number close to three hundred
million, the U.S. decennial census is an understandably complex
informational undertaking. As such, the policies and practices
governing the handling of sensitive information collected during
the census serve as an intriguing example for analysis. Be it
statutes legally requiring respondents to provide personal
information or punitive guidelines under which bureau employees
find themselves subject in cases of confidentiality breaches,
the census offers a bevy of informational handling techniques
from which one can learn just how such a complicated data collection
still maintains integrity. This project both traces the socio-historical
development of these techniques and with the assistance of Sam Hawala
(PORTIA Research Partner) at the U.S. Census Bureau seeks to study
current census information initiatives.
Selected Works
SPT Conference Abstract, July 2005
Trip Report 1/19/05 U.S. Census Bureau
DCC Conference Talk , October 2004
Privacy and the Design of Vehicle Safety Communication Technologies
Lead Researcher: Michael Zimmer
This project investigates the value implications of the design of
Vehicle Safety Communication technologies, ad-hoc peer-to-peer
communication networks between vehicles and roadside infrastructure. In
collaboration with Dr. Dan Boneh (Stanford) and the Vehicle Safety
Communication Consortium, we explore how the introduction of VSC
technologies might disrupt existing values of privacy of personal
information, what Dr. Helen Nissenbaum calls the contextual integrity
of personal information flows. Since VSC applications and their
technical standards and protocols are still in the developmental stage,
the goal of this project is to both raise awareness within the VSC
design community of the value implications of their design decisions,
and guide the designers to be proactive in their decisions to support
the existing contextual integrity of personal information in the context
of highway travel.
Selected Works
CEPE Conference Abstract, July 2005
SPT Conference Abstract, July 2005
Science & Technology in Society Conference Paper(pdf), April 2005
DCC Conference Talk , October 2004
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags
Lead Researcher: Rachel Aridor
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags are tiny chips consisting from tags
and readers. The tags are able to emit information to radio signal scanners --
the readers, up to ten feet away and through paper, fabric and plastic. RFID
tags can be implanted in or attached to virtually anything from washing machines,
trousers and razors packages to livestock and, it is anticipated, one day, people.
The information contained in the tag identifies the tag itself, describes the item
it is attached to, or identifies the person carrying the tag.
Prospective users of RFID tags have praised their tremendous promise for streamlining
the stocking, warehousing, and delivery of goods, as well as in preventing theft and
other losses. Privacy advocates, on the other hand, point out a worrisome possibility
of a multitude of commodities with the capacity to disseminate information about consumers
without their permission or even awareness.
In this research we try first to identify the technological structure of RFID, the technological
differences between various types of RFID tags, and its potential technological developments.
Then we analyze the implications each of the technological features has on the ability of
the tags today, and on their prospective ability, to gather information, i.e. the amount
and the type of information that can be gathered, the distance through which it can be gathered,
the identity of those who gather it, and the possible use of that information. After concluding
this analysis we will turn to examine applying the idea of contextual integrity to RFID tags.
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©
2003 NYU Dept. of Culture & Communications
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