This document discusses online privacy and identity in the context of hyperdata. It begins with background on Edward Snowden and PRISM. It then discusses how most digital data is created by individuals but collected by companies, and debates if privacy is the right to be forgotten. It introduces the concepts of hyperdata as linked data objects and metadata, and how this relates to privacy through context and links. It discusses identity as a puzzle and network. It lists investigation points around hyperdata languages, graph analysis, and privacy attacks. Finally it discusses potential applications of this information.

1. Online Footprints
What the internet knows about you.

2. Agenda
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Background
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Online Privacy
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Hyperdata
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Identity
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Investigation Points
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Possible Applications

3. Background

4. “When you're in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for
the sort of intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more
information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of
that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal
person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances. When you see
everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that
some of these things are actually abuses. And when you talk to people about
them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend
not to take them very seriously and move on from them.”
Edward Snowden

5. PRISM

6. Online Privacy

7. Is Privacy the right to be forgotten?
Three-quarters of the 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information online has
been created by individual users. On top of that, an increasing amount of
additional data about those users is collected by public and private companies.
Library Briefing - Library of the European Parliament - 01/03/2012

8. Not yet..
Directorate-General for Internal Policies of the European Parliament published
a study on Citizens Rights and Constitutional Affairs, stating:
“The study contends that an analysis of European surveillance programmes
cannot be reduced to a question of balance between data protection versus
national security, but has to be framed in terms of collective freedoms and
democracy.”

9. “Privacy”
In an online context, the right to privacy has commonly been interpreted as a
right to “information self-determination”.
Acts typically claimed to breach online privacy concern the collection of
personal information without consent, the selling of personal information and
the further processing of that information.

10. Hyperdata

11. “The web is fundamentally a distributed hypermedia application”
Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory and Practice
Taylor, Medividovic, Dashofy (2010)

12. The age of the “metadata”
In addition to user-generated content, “meta-data” is collected and stored by
public and private organisations about where, when and who created that
content.

13. Metadata is more interesting than actual information.

14. Personas
http://personas.media.mit.edu/
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information attempting to characterize the person to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive
corpus of data.

15. Hyperdata
Hyperdata indicates data objects linked to other data objects in other places,
as hypertext indicates text linked to other text in other places. Hyperdata
enables formation of a web of data, evolving from the "data on the Web" that is
not inter-related (or at least, not linked).
Wikipedia

16. Hyperdata
It is not a buzz-word.
Hyperdata is at the core of the web nowadays.
Hyperdata means snippets of information linked between each others.

17. Why is it relevant to privacy?
Because links are context.
Context is semantics.
Privacy protection means knowing which are the weakest links that can reveal
something about ourselves.

18. Identity

20. ●
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Where do I work?
Who are my friends?
What music do I like?
When do I exercise?
What music do I like when I
exercise?
Where do I spend my time?
Who do I communicate with?
…
Identity is a puzzle

21. Identity is a network

22. An example: histogram of a twitter user checkins profile

23. Investigation points

24. Investigation points
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Hyperdata and hyperdata languages
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Graph analysis
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Information theory and statistical analysis
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Privacy attacks (ex: neighbourhood attack, friend in the middle,...)

25. Applications

26. Applications
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Social Networks
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Web surfing habits (i.e. browser state, stored cookies)
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Mobile applications
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Sensor data
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Bitcoin graph mining

27. Thank you!
Please talk to me, I’d love to exchange some thoughts and doubts.
silviap@ieee.org