As concern about privacy and use of personal data grows, solutions are starting to emerge.

This week I attended an excellent symposium on ‘The Digital Person’ at Wolfson College Cambridge, organised by HATLAB.

The HATLAB consortium have developed a platform where users can store their personal data securely. They can then license others to use selected parts of it (e.g. for website registration, identity verification or social media) on terms that they, the user, is in control of.

This turns the table on organisations like Facebook and Google who have given users little choice about the rights over their own data, or how it might be used or passed on to third parties. GDPR is changing this through regulation. HATLAB promises to change it through giving users full legal rights to their data – an approach that very much aligns with the trend towards decentralisation and the empowerment of individuals. The HATLAB consortium, led by Irene Ng, is doing a brilliant job in teasing out the various issues and finding ways of putting the user back in control of their own data.

Highlights

Every talk at this symposium was interesting and informative. Some highlights include:

• Misinformation and Business Models: Professor Jon Crowcroft
  
• Taking back control of Personal Data: Professor Max van Kleek
  
• Ethics-Theatre in Machine Learning: Professor John Naughton
  
• Stop being creepy: Getting Personalisation and Recommendation right: Irene Ng
  

There was also some excellent discussion amongst the delegates who were well informed about the issues.

See the Slides

Fortunately I don’t have to go into great detail about these talks because thanks to the good organisation of the event the speakers slide sets are all available at:

https://www.hat-lab.org/wolfsonhat-symposium-2019

I would highly recommend taking a look at them and supporting the HATLAB project in any way you can.