Two talks at last week’s FIRST conference looked at how Artificial Intelligence might be used in incident response. In both cases, the use of AI improves user privacy directly – by reducing or eliminating the need for human responders to look at user data – and also indirectly, by producing faster detection and mitigation of […]
Category: Articles
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
Threat Intelligence is something of a perennial topic at FIRST conferences. Three presentations this year discussed how we can generate and consume information about cyber-threats more effectively. First Martin Eian from Mnemonic described using (topological) graphs to represent threat information. Objects, such as domain names, IP addresses and malware samples are vertices in the graph. […]
Some security incidents need more than a technical solution. Two talks at this week’s FIRST conference looked at the importance of human factors, in crisis management and vulnerability handling. Jaco Cloete looked at situations where a cyber-incident can become a business incident, causing reputational damage, social media fallout, loss of market share, regulatory fines, even […]
Ben Hawkes, from Google’s Project Zero, gave a fascinating keynote presentation on vulnerability disclosure policies at this week’s FIRST Conference. There is little disagreement about the aim of such policies: to ensure that discovering a vulnerability in software or hardware reduces/minimises the harm the vulnerability subsequently causes. And, to achieve that, there are only really […]
The ICO’s latest notice of a Monetary Penalty Notice, on Ticketmaster, contains unusually detailed guidance on the good practice they expect transactional websites to adopt. Although the particular breach concerned credit card data, this seems likely to apply to any site that takes customer data or that uses third party components. The whole notice is […]
The latest reports from the ICO sandbox provide important clarification of how data protection law applies to, and can guide, the application of novel technologies. This post looks at information sharing… FutureFlow’s Transaction Monitoring and Forensic Analysis Platform lets financial institutions such as banks upload pseudonymised transaction data to a common platform where they, regulators […]
Sandbox Tales: Machine Learning
The latest reports from the ICO sandbox provide important clarification of how data protection law applies to, and can guide, the application of novel technologies. This post looks at machine learning… Onfido’s engagement looked at how to train and review the performance of machine learning models. In thinking about that I’d concluded that the GDPR […]
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) has responded to the Schrems II judgment with a risk-based roadmap for EU institutions: Perform an inventory of all flows of personal data to entities outside the EU; Priority for change will be existing transfers with either no legal basis, those based on a derogation, and those to organisations […]
Working with non-human intelligence
Today’s expert panel on Data Ethics took a fascinating turn: to consider what a healthy relationship between human and AI would look like. Although we tend to discuss characteristics and affordances of technology, proper use of technology depends on the human side of the partnership, too. When choosing or using any tool that uses AI, […]
This morning’s discussion – jointly hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on Data Analytics and Health – suggested that if we want uses of health data to be trusted, we need to trust citizens and patients to think more deeply about benefits and risks than media headlines might suggest. The session was inspired by a […]