She intends to secure personal data on social networks
How can we guarantee privacy for millions of users of Facebook, Twitter and Wikileaks? We cannot. With a SEK 10 million grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, SSF, Sonja Buchegger will investigate how we can regain control of our own personal data in social networks.
Who can get their hands on our user data and take advantage of it? Privacy is on everyone’s lips these days. The fact that the ACCESS researcher Sonja Buchegger, Associate Professor of Theoretical Computer Science, was chosen to be a future research leader by SSF with her application entitled Protection of Personal Information on Social Networks, shows the urgency of this matter.
"Today you cannot protect your personal information from the owners of social networks such as Facebook. My research is aimed at developing a secure social network with peer-to-peer technology and encryption to protect user data and information about the users," she asserts.
It feels a lot more secure knowing that this researcher favours a holistic approach to research and pushes the boundaries of multidisciplinary collaboration in order to come to terms with this privacy problem. This is particularly reassuring for someone like me who no longer clicks on the like or dislike buttons on Facebook as I hear that the function is owned by a private company that is doing business with my views.
She has an extensive background in economics, computer networks and security which ensures that she stays with the big picture. And anyone who has heard Sonja Buchegger in a seminar knows that she moves freely between these areas, and here and there takes her inspiration from the political philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice, for example when she supports making it beneficial for everyone to behave well in distributed networks. These distributed methods of organising and collecting data come from a technology that can also be applied to cloud services, allowing users to store data in different countries. Anything to make our networks secure.
"Today our data on social networks is stored in large centralised collections. This is problematic, as we only have limited control over what happens to our data and even that varies over time. The data may be leaked, mined, or even sold off by the owners of social networks," says Sonja.
"We will study how we can use new applications such as social networks while regaining control of our own personal data. We intend to do this by decentralising these collections and securing the data using peer-to-peer technology and encryption, which will make it possible for us to decide who gets to see our data since there is no central provider who can give access to others or change their terms of service."
For Sonja personally, becoming an SSF scholar means she will receive management training and plenty of opportunities to discuss burning questions or exchange ideas with other scientists on the five-year programme. The grant will be primarily used to build a research group of PhD and postdoctoral students around the topic privacy-preserving social networks.
"We will gain momentum by having several people working together on different aspects of the topic. As the grant is for five years, we can afford to be bolder and freer in our research and thus take more risks," she says assertively.
And this is crucial in an interconnected networked world where social networks have just begun to invade our privacy. But is it possible to control something as evasive and subversive as the free flow of information on social networks?
"I think that privacy issues will become even more pertinent in the near future. We already see a lot of discussions about privacy on Facebook, how much data Google has on their users, the role of Twitter for dissidents in Iran, and of course the Wikileaks. In order to tackle the privacy issue we need to bring several disciplines together and in order to get the technology right we need to combine networking and security with cryptography, which we are working on. But beyond the underlying technology, we also need more human-computer interaction research to make privacy easier to understand for users so they can adjust the privacy settings of the applications they use," states Sonja.
"Social networks are merely the starting point though, once there are enough building blocks for distributed private communications, we can come up with new applications that no one has thought of yet."
For more information, contact Sonja Buchegger, +46 (0)8 790 68 84
buc@csc.kth.se.
Marie Androv
