The Financial Times has named Prof. Tim Berners-Lee its "Boldness in Business" Person of the Year for his work aimed at providing people with more control over how their personal data is used online, reports John Thornhill. “We know how to fire rockets into the sky. We should be able to build constructive social networks,” says Lee.
MIT researchers have found that it’s easy to reidentify anonymized data compiled in massive datasets, reports Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan for Fast Company. The findings show that urban planners, tech companies and designers, “who stand to learn so much from these big urban datasets,” writes Campbell-Dollaghan, “need to be careful about whether all that data could be combined to deanonymize it.”
A new study by MIT researchers provides evidence that compiling massive anonymized datasets of people’s movement patterns can put their private data at risk, reports the Xinhua news agency. The researchers found “data containing ‘location stamps’ – information with geographical coordinates and time stamps – could be used to easily track the mobility trajectories of how people live and work.”
MIT researchers have developed a way to prevent the theft of sensitive data hidden on a computer’s memory, writes TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker. Storing sensitive data in different memory locations creates “clear boundaries for where sharing should and should not happen, so that programs with sensitive information can keep that data reasonably secure,” explains graduate student Vladimir Kiriansky.
Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, has announced the launch of his new company Inrupt. The startup will use an open-source project called Solid, which Berners-Lee developed with colleagues at MIT, to “reshape the web and ‘restore the power and agency of the individuals’ using it,” writes Jason Evangelho for Forbes.
Prof. Tim Berners-Lee discusses his new startup Inrupt, which is “the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building,” writes Katrina Brooker for Fast Company. Inrupt’s mission is “to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it,” says Brooker.
Steven Melendez of Fast Company reports on a new system from MIT researchers called Accountability of Unreleased Data for Improved Transparency, or AUDIT, which could help the public track police surveillance. “While certain information may need to stay secret for an investigation to be done properly, some details have to be revealed for accountability to even be possible,” says graduate student Jonathan Frankle.
In an article for The Boston Globe, Micah Altman, director of research at the MIT Libraries, points to the safeguarding of sensitive information in scientific research as proof that it is possible to protect online privacy. With institutional review boards and informed consent practices, academia demonstrates “that you don’t have to choose between privacy and valuable data,” explains Altman.
Veil, an incognito browsing system developed at CSAIL, can eliminate trace evidence of internet usage. “Veil takes things further than perhaps any other anonymous browsing method by masking the page you’re viewing not just from would-be attackers, but from your own operating system,” writes Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch.
In a recent paper, CSAIL researchers propose a new system, Veil, which uses servers to conceal private web browsing data from internet service providers, reports Rob Verger of Popular Science. Through this system, the provider “would only see the connection to the blinding server, which hosts the actual content” and not the website the user is visiting, explains Verger.
Writing for Wired, Prof. Ethan Zuckerman and Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula of the Digital Currency Initiative address the difficulties in creating decentralized social media networks. “If users have more control of their data, including the right to export and reuse content they’ve created and friends they follow, they’ll be more willing to experiment with new platforms,” the researchers suggest.
Graduate student Frank Wang speaks with WGBH reporter Ciku Theuri about an encryption system developed by MIT researchers that can provide web users more online privacy. Wang explains that the system hits a “sweet point where we can actually say … we have pretty good security and we're pretty practical.”
Prof. Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Turing prize for his work developing the World Wide Web, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “It is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention,” says ACM President Vicki Hanson.
Prof. Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded the Turing Award for his work creating the World Wide Web and its underlying technology, reports Klint Finley for Wired. The web “succeeded because of the work he and so many other put into stewarding it as a platform,” writes Finley.
Prof. Tim Berners-Lee has won this year’s Turing Award, writes AP reporter Michael Liedtke. "It's a crowning achievement," says Berners-Lee of winning what is considered the Nobel prize for computing. "But I think the award is for the Web as a project, and the massive international collaborative spirit of all that have joined me to help."