Privacy by Design: An Engineering Ethics Perspective

A panel discussion with

• Ben Adida, director of identity, Mozilla
• Brian Kennish, co-founder, Disconnect
• Arvind Narayanan, assistant professor of computer science, Princeton
• Irina Raicu, Internet ethics program manager, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

Speaker bios

Ben Adida is director of identity at Mozilla. His focus is on autonomy: empowering individuals with secure, private, and efficient access to their data. Adida has applied these principles to secure voting, personal health records, and the broader Web. Over more than 15 years, he has developed extensive free software, and he is a technical advisor to the Creative Commons and to Harvard Medical School. Previously, Adida was a research faculty member at Harvard Medical School/ Children's Hospital Boston, a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard, and an affiliate with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his PhD at MIT in the Cryptography and Information Security group.

Brian Kennish is the cofounder of Disconnect—a Palo Alto based startup that makes tools designed to help users understand and control the data they share on the web. The company's products, Disconnect and Collusion, are top-rated browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Prior to cofounding Disconnect, Kennish worked at Google (where he started the company's sales and support engineering teams) and at DoubleClick (where he wrote the company's mobile ad server and tools).

Arvind Narayanan is an assistant professor in computer science at Princeton. He studies information privacy and security and has a side-interest in technology policy. His research has shown that data anonymization is broken in fundamental ways; for that work, he was a co- recipient of the 2008 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award. He is one of the researchers behind the "Do Not Track" proposal, which allows consumers to signal their choices to websites. Narayanan is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

This panel, part of the "IT, Ethics, and Law" lecture series co-sponsored by the Ethics Center and the High Tech Law Institute, was held January 23, 2013.