Google Federated Privacy 2019: The Dragon in the Room
I’m back from a very interesting Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics that was organized by Peter Kairouz and Brendan McMahan from Google’s federated learning team and was held at Google Seattle.
For the first part of my talk, I covered Bargav’s work on evaluating differentially private machine learning, but I reserved the last few minutes of my talk to address the cognitive dissonance I felt being at a Google meeting on privacy.
I don’t want to offend anyone, and want to preface this by saying I have lots of friends and former students who work for Google, people that I greatly admire and respect – so I want to raise the cognitive dissonance I have being at a “privacy” meeting run by Google, in the hopes that people at Google actually do think about privacy and will able to convince me how wrong I am.
Violations of Children’s Privacy Laws
The New York Times has an article, How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data about a lawsuit the state of New Mexico is bringing against app markets (including Google) that allow apps presented as being for children in the Play store to violate COPPA rules and mislead users into tracking children. The lawsuit stems from a study led by Serge Egleman’s group at UC Berkeley that analyzed COPPA violations in children’s apps. Serge was an undergraduate student here (back in the early 2000s) – one of the things he did as a undergraduate was successfully sue a spammer.
USENIX Security 2018
Three SRG posters were presented at USENIX Security Symposium 2018 in Baltimore, Maryland:
- Nathaniel Grevatt (GDPR-Compliant Data Processing: Improving Pseudonymization with Multi-Party Computation)
- Matthew Wallace and Parvesh Samayamanthula (Deceiving Privacy Policy Classifiers with Adversarial Examples)
- Guy Verrier (How is GDPR Affecting Privacy Policies?, joint with Haonan Chen and Yuan Tian)
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There were also a surprising number of appearances by an unidentified unicorn:
Your poster may have made the cut for the #usesec18 Poster Reception, but has it received the approval of a tiny, adorable unicorn? @UVA #seenatusesec18 #girlswhocode #futurecomputerscientist #dreambig pic.twitter.com/bZOO6lYLXK