Home » Program » Panel

Panel

The panel session will take place on Wednesday, May 28th, 17:00-18:30

 Panel on Data Protection and Security on the Web

Abstract: 

On March 12th, in occasion of the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee made an open call for a “Magna Carta” to protect Web users. He said: "It's time for us to make a big communal decision. In front of us are two roads — which way are we going to go? Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control — more and more surveillance? Or are we going to set up a bunch of values? Are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the World Wide Web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?"
We all know that guaranteeing privacy and security at the same time in a world without the WWW is a challenge, and that each country addresses it in a different way by means of local regulations as well as international agreements. Identifying the right tradeoff on the Web is probably even more complicated, as we deal with a virtual world, where geographical borders loose their importance and role. 

The aim of this panel is to identify and discuss the most important issues that should be addressed in order to guarantee web users privacy, on one hand, without putting their security in danger, and web users security, on the other hand, without limiting their freedom by invading their private lives. Can semantics play any role in this trade-off? 

We ask our panelists to summarize in three main statements their view on, and possibly their solution to, this problem, hence giving their advice to the definition of a Web users “Magna Carta”.   

 

Panel Chair & Moderator: 

  • Valentina Presutti

 

Panelists: 

  • Harith Alani

"Many projects, papers, and businesses, are centred around social media data, but how many comply fully with EU data protection directives and regulations?"

"Do we even know how to translate and embed such laws into our tools and research practices?"

"Can we take this challenge, and opportunity, to design and build semantic tools for lawful gathering and analysis of social data?"

  • Pompeu Casanovas

"Security and privacy (data protection) are two faces of the same coin."

"Principles of fair information practices (FIPs) and "privacy by design" (PbD) deal also with metadata and the so-called "identity meta-system" layer of the Internet."

"Implementation of security by design implies a democratic political turn towards a global digital neighborhood."

  • Luciano Floridi

"The EU’s current ethical focus on personal data protection is unbalanced."

"It favours too much the protection of an individual’s privacy and right to be forgotten."

"It entirely ignores the need to protect personal data when whole groups are in question."

  • Fabien Gandon

"Semantics are a double-edged weapon for security."

"Deployment requires security on every floor."

"Security is much more than a technical problem."

  • Aldo Gangemi

"A little semantics goes a long way to both granting and harming a trade-off between privacy and security."

"The trade-off between privacy and security is a suq-like issue, where the attempts to cleanly control it may create more harm than good."

"As with the majority of human-accessible worlds, semantics is broken, but most humans know what is appropriate to do, given a certain context: probably the only reason why we haven't collapsed yet."

  • Steffen Staab

"Data protection and security is not an issue to be solved once and for all, but an enduring issue like traffic safety."

"Data protection and security is and will remain inconvenient, even if the kind of inconvenience should (and will) shift."

"Technology helps to encrypt, explain and suggest."

  • Maria Esther Vidal

"The EU’s current ethical focus on personal data protection is unbalanced."

"It favours too much the protection of an individual’s privacy and right to be forgotten."

"It entirely ignores the need to protect personal data when whole groups are in question."

  • Evelyne Vegas