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supramundane agency. A geometric form based on quasicrystals

PETs and AI: Privacy Washing and the Need for a PETs Evaluation Framework

Dagstuhl, DE ⬩
The participants in the seminar, standing on stairs outside.

Schloss Dagstuhl is a German public institution that hosts research seminars in computer science. I was delighted to be invited to this seminar on PETs and AI: Privacy Washing and the Need for a PETs Evaluation Framework alongside a group of excellent researchers.

The core issue is that PETs (Privacy-Enhancing Technologies) were supposed to undermine power and serve people, but in practice they often focus on confidentiality and not privacy, serve to legitimate inappropriate processes, and their deployment requirements can limit their use to the richest companies. In other words, PETs have done more to entrench power than to undermine it. Our work is therefore to propose a newer framework for PET evaluation that takes these aspects into account instead of just focusing mathematical amusements that enable privacy-preserving surveillance.

Computer science isn't any more neutral than other sciences and we should expect practioners to behave accordingly. I look forward to finishing the paper with the collaboration.