Privacy is always a requirement

Wednesday 6th May 2015, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Eleanor McHugh.

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

This event is free of charge and open to all. No registration required - just turn up.

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This meeting is supported by NCR.

Synopsis

We live in an age when governments, big business, criminal syndicates, terrorist organisations and the intelligence community are all increasingly focusing their efforts on the internet. Here amidst the chirruping of ones and zeroes they hope to find the deepest secrets of their respective forms of activity, buried in the mass of data and meta-data which billions daily produce as a consequence of living in a high-tech twenty-first century society. In such a world privacy, identity and trust become the key battlegrounds in the fight for freedom of expression and political agency.

As a practical researcher working in industry on digital identity and anonymised trust systems I'd like to share with you insights on digital privacy developed over the past decade and encourage you to look at your own applications from a fresh perspective where instead of trying to know everything you can about about individual users to serve the needs of business, you instead focus on the bare minimum you need to serve the needs of your users.

Unusually for me this will not be a talk about code, but about principles and ideals with a bare minimum of examples (in Go and/or Ruby) to show practical application.

About the speaker

London-based privacy researcher Ellie trained as a physicist and for the last two decades has worked on mission-critical systems ranging across cockpit avionics, broadcast automation and digital identity management. She's well-known in the Ruby and Go communities for her talks on low-level programming, often a mix of networking and cryptography, which have lead to her first book "A Go Developer's Notebook" (currently in alpha on Leanpub) and she also helps select clients develop architectures for anchoring trust in public networks. For light relief she brews, listens to spooky music and wrangles polyhedral dice with the help of soulmate Andy and son Tom.