Data Science made in Switzerland

Ein Blog der ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften

Category: Privacy

Data protection – are we really paradoxical?

1. February 2021 / / 1 Comment

By Nico Ebert (ZHAW)

translated from the original German language version published at Inside IT

A common narrative in practice sounds something like this: “people claim data protection is important to them, but in reality they give away everything on the internet anyway”. There are also some science studies that seem to prove this again and again: that we are generally careless with our and other personal data and that we consider data protection important but neglect it in everyday life. For example, a “pizza experiment” with 3,000 students at a US university in 2017 concluded that a free pizza was enough of an incentive to reveal the email addresses of three fellow students (Athey et al. 2017).

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The Psychology of Cookie Banners from a Data Privacy Perspective

13. October 2020 / / 0 Comments

By Nico Ebert (ZHAW)

cross-posted from the author’s blog

Many Internet users inside and outside the European Union are very familiar with cookie banners: they pop up on websites, they are often annoying, and it is tedious to really deal with them. Having to state our data sharing and protection preferences over and over again is a questionable concept by itself. But even if we accept the concept of cookie banner as a matter of fact our behavior towards them seems paradox at a first glance.

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Algorithmic Fairness – Algorithms and Social Justice

5. February 2020 / / 0 Comments

By Christoph Heitz (ZHAW)

translated from original German language version published at Inside IT

Can a prisoner be released early, or released on bail? A judge who decides this should also consider the risk of recidivism of the person to be released. Wouldn’t it be an advantage to be able to assess this risk objectively and reliably? This was the idea behind the COMPAS system developed by the US company Northpoint.

The system makes an individual prediction of the chance of recidivism for imprisoned offenders, based on a wide range of personal data. The result is a risk score between 1 and 10, where 10 corresponds to a very high risk of recidivism. This system has been used for many years in various U.S. states to support decision making of judges – more than one million prisoners have already been evaluated using COMPAS. The advantages are obvious: the system produces an objective risk prediction that has been developed and validated on the basis of thousands of cases.

In May 2016, however, the journalists’ association ProPublica published the results of research suggesting that this software systematically discriminates against black people and overestimates their risk (Angwin et al. 2016): 45 percent of black offenders who did not reoffend after their release were identified as high-risk. In the corresponding group of whites, however, only 23 percent were attributed a high risk by the algorithm. This means that the probability of being falsely assigned a high risk of recidivism is twice as high for a black person as for a white person.

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What is the value of data privacy?

23. May 2019 / / 0 Comments

By Nico Ebert (ZHAW)

The original version of this post was published in German on Privacy Bits and English on vetri.global

In a lecture for the Fair Data Forum, I dealt with the question “What value does data protection have for individuals and what are they willing to pay for it?”

The three data privacy types

As always, there is not one “individual”, as everyone has different data protection preferences and thus, attributes different value to having personal data safeguarded. Therefore, in order to classify individuals, there are different “typologies”. For example, Westin distinguishes between data protection fundamentalists, data protection pragmatists and completely unconcerned individuals. In 2002, Sheehan (2002) selected 889 persons in the USA and classified them with a questionnaire. Conclusion: 16% of the respondents were completely unconcerned about data protection, 81% were classified as pragmatists, and 3% as fundamentalists.

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