Privacy Talk with Victoria Lemieux, Associate Professor at British Columbia University“What Will Be Future Transparent Society?״

This interview is talking about blockchain and public transparency at new trend of privacy-driven data economy.

Kohei is having great time discussing with international data protection and blockchain expert Victoria Lemieux.

This interview outline:

• Introduction
• What is the role of the School of Information?
• What is the main research theme?
• How Canadian government prevent the privacy?

Kohei: Thank you for that Vicki coming to the privacy talk this time so I’m very glad to have you on board here to make a conversation regarding privacy, or. Also the blockchain Explorer is here.

So I’m very good to have you at this time. So let’s move on. So, the key there please introduce about yourself and backgrounds and also the you’re researching expertise in universities, please share yourself.

• Introduction

Vicki: Thanks, thanks again Kohei for inviting me. It’s really a pleasure and it’s been a pleasure to meet you. So a little bit about me, I’m an associate professor of archival science at the School of Information at the University of British Columbia, and archival science is really a traditional field that is looking at the trustworthiness of records.

So when you think of archival science you probably think of archivists who are classically trained to preserve old records in archival institutions and that is actually how I was trained that’s my background. But over the years, of course, archives and records creation have become digital. So I began to specialize in digital records and record keeping.

And I worked for many years before becoming a professor. And one of the areas that I worked in was IT security. So I became knowledgeable in IT security and combine that with my knowledge of archives and record keeping and digital archives and record keeping.

And then when I joined the University of British Columbia as a professor, I started to specialize in research that was at the intersection of digital archives and record keeping and IT security and risk management and so on.

And so that’s what led me really towards researching what I am today in blockchain technology. And it was a perfect sort of coming together or confluence of all of the past professional experiences and training that I had that led me to that point, and it really was started in 2016. I happen to be reading an article in The Financial Times. That was about the government of Honduras.

They were going to start using a blockchain for their land registry records. And I said, Hmm, I think this sounds really interesting I think I better learn some more about this. And so that’s when I started to research and study blockchain technology.

So that was, that’s kind of like a fast overview of how I got to running Blockchain@UBC at the University of British Columbia, which we set up in October 2016.

And yes and I’ve never looked back. I mean now I’m just fully focused on researching blockchain technology and all the many different issues including privacy, that are related to this very interesting technology.

Kohei: Yeah, Thank you for your honored to be here introduction with you. I’m also betting on the blockchain it’s the almost two years here, which is the power of the future technologies to infrastructures to be a connected each other, the individual processing, which is the very important to take an actions, not just to rely on this specific on the trusted parties that we can make it ourselves so that’s a very great philosophy for us.

So, I want to move to about the like your activity in British Columbia. So you are part of the Blockchain@UBC research, as well as the iSchool in British Columbia. I saw that in websites that reputation, iSchool is a very human or liberty based approach in new technologies. So, please tell us about the about iSchool and what the policies and the philosophy is that you are working on the research.

• What is the role of the School of Information?

Vicki: So, you’re right. The School of Information takes a different approach. In general, it takes a different approach to developing technology than maybe to what you would take if you were in engineering, all these approaches are really valuable but the differentiator with the iSchool approach is that it’s very human-centered.

So we always start with looking at technology as human-centered and also as the term is socio-technical. So, technology isn’t just about the technical components that we create and that work together, but it also is implemented in a social environment, the technology itself and the way it’s brought together expresses human and social values we can bring into it. So for example if we’re talking about privacy.

We have been talking about COVID-19 tracking and tracing apps. You could develop a COVID-19 tracking and tracing app that really didn’t matter if it respected people’s privacy or not, the main focus was just on gathering up as much data as you could and making sure you could track down as many people as you can to manage public health.

That would be one approach to designing that technology to be very effective from a public health standpoint, potentially, if people trusted it enough to use it.

But what we know is that people don’t always respond to technologies the way that we expect them to; maybe that people don’t use your tracking and tracing technology because they’re afraid of surveillance, or they’re afraid their privacy would be breached, in which case you might then design a technology that is more respecting of privacy, based on considering what the actual user values and how they might respond to your technology so that’s Human-centered design.

And that’s the approach that we take in the iSchool. The School of Information is a very human centered approach, understanding that technologies express human values, and actually they construct the reality that we all live in. So when we design them we better be thinking about what kind of reality we do want to live in.

Kohei: That’s that’s pretty unique to me close the in the blockchain or many new technology space has not seen in this specific human base to build up the architecture, I guess this is the very important when it come to the dissemination of the technology into societies.

So, right now especially, a lot of the people is, like, build out the technology first, but the same data coming back to ours, right, because the humans are using it technologies.

Back to the history we are experiencing the same things right or automobiles, or other manufacturing, many things in that sense, the same things in the internet as well.

So I think this kind of the approaches are very important that you are walking on iSchool. So the next question is about the more specific one. You are working on the blockchain the UBC, what is also the excellent job. The also I found the two papers on research.

One is that DATA SOVEREIGNTY FOR INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY and BUILDING TRUST & PROTECTING PRIVACY, like protecting the privacy so could you give us the brief introduction of these two papers?

・What is the main research theme?

Vicki: So, um, well we’re just, you know, this is just my research, I’ll just say that Blockchain@UBC is a multidisciplinary blockchain research cluster so I really have to acknowledge all the wonderful work that my colleagues and fellow faculty and students and postdocs are doing.

And so there, there’s so much research that’s going on that is related to the School of Information but also the computer science department and our engineering faculty, our business faculty, or policy students and researchers.

So this is like maybe just a tip of the iceberg of all the research that we’re working on but let me focus on these two projects that you’ve picked out because they’re projects that I’m actually involved in so the first one is data sovereignty for indigenous sovereignty.

And I actually have a PhD student right now with his whole focus now on how we can use blockchain technology to really again express the values of indigenous peoples.

And what will that look like in terms of the design of the technology that might differ from expression of values for non-indigenous people so the data sovereignty for indigenous sovereignty project is looking at that and saying that it’s all part of, you know, part of an indigenous sovereignty movement that recognizes that records and data actually can be used to control people and can embed power.

So if you think about identity documents right. Most of our nation states like Canada, you know, Government of Japan, they issue us with identity documents such as birth certificates passports and so on. And that shows that we have certain rights and entitlements within that particular nation state,

But for many peoples around the world, you know, including indigenous people, the power of the nation state, and the issuance of these kinds of documents that identify you in society has been a way in which they have experienced oppression. They have experienced abuse within society. I mean look at the Black Lives Matter movement and what is happening with black people.

Many people will experience society in different ways, and it’s not always as positive as other people we all experience it differently and some of us come from, and I consider myself one of those people, very privileged places. Indigenous sovereignty movement is really about taking control of data and records as a way of empowering Indigenous people themselves.

The traditional record keeping databases maintained by the Canadian government have, you know, information about treaties and who is a member of treaties and, identification who holds land rights or logging rights or fishing rights.

That information has been maintained traditionally by the Government of Canada. And the idea is that these traditional centralized database technologies, you know, that model of the government sort of holding those data and maintaining it is, you know, retaining power and control in the hands of the Government of Canada and not necessarily Indigenous people.

So, data sovereignty for Indigenous sovereignty, which explores blockchain, and in particular self-sovereign identity technology which is enabled by blockchain, to decentralize the power to control and custody of data to push it out to Indigenous people themselves so they can take custody and control of their data, and they can decide how they’re going to share it, how they’re going to use that data, and through having the control over their own data become empowered to make decisions about themselves.

For example, we had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in Canada about some terrible atrocities where Indigenous children were taken from their families, and they were put into residential schools.

And so they were removed from their cultures, and they were forced to not speak their own language and not live according to their own traditions, and many of them were also abused in many different ways, and some gave testimony about the how they had suffered under this regime.

And some people wanted to share their testimony, and have it be part of the public record, have it be part of history, and some people didn’t want to share that testimony at all or maybe only wanted to share it with family members.

And there was a big debate about should it be public or should it be private. But we don’t necessarily have to choose if we give people self-sovereignty. They can decide: some people may choose to make it open. Some people may say, “I’m only going to allow certain people to see this information. It’s for me to choose who I share it with.”

So this is why we’re looking at this particular issue of Indigenous sovereignty because we see such potential for the empowerment of people who you know have, have not been empowered within society, to become empowered through control of their own data.

So that’s that project. It’s very early stage because my PhD student really just in his first year, but we have been working with Indigenous partners like our partners ChinookX. And that work has been going on for about a couple of years, exploring this particular issue. So it’s an ongoing piece of work and we’ll see where, where it lands. The other one is building trust and protecting privacy.

This is really a broad area, there’s a lot of my research that touches upon this, but it’s really around the question of privacy and how does it promote trust in society. We have privacy in order to be able to trust to use certain services and I’m thinking, you know, particularly about my research in healthcare.

So I may not want to use a telemedicine service or health review service if I feel like the service that I’m going to use is going to result in a data breach, or that the particular service I’m using is going to take my data, and then sell it to a third party without my authorization.

I actually have a name for that which draws upon Bitcoin and blockchain cryptocurrency. I call it “data double spending.” So, I give you permission to use my data for a particular purpose, like maybe to access a service, and you turn around and you double spend my data without my consent or another purpose like . . .

Selling it to a third party for advertising purposes or, you know, we heard about Facebook and selling to organizations that were targeting people for political reasons like in the Brexit vote and the US election. I call that “Data Double Spending”.

So, what I think is that we need to build greater trust that there are technical mechanisms, but also laws and regulations that prevent that, you know that I should be able to know what my data is going to be used for, where it’s going to be stored, how it’s going to be used.

And so there needs to be that transparency and the technologies that we use, and that we deploy to manage the data. They should be designed in a way to facilitate that. And then that’s again why I’m looking at self-sovereign identity blockchain technology because it is a technology that can help us achieve that. So my research is focused mostly in the healthcare space right now but not exclusively.

Because healthcare is one area where it is really sensitive data and we want to make sure that we are protecting privacy to build trust. So those are two projects that I have going on and I’m going to be doing a research talk.

And I’ll be giving an overview of the particular work that we’ve done in a healthcare project, the platform that we built is called My Personal Health Wallet.

And we’ve actually done some focus groups with members of the public to ask them what do you think about this platform and we’ve learned a lot through that and we’ve also identified some technical gaps in the platform so I’ll be talking about that at that session so if you want to tune in for that you can do that. （This is the session link）

Kohei: Sure, sure. Yeah, please show me that’s the details, So, the spreading and my communities, which is the very good topics to considers to make sure that I guess the, you said the trust is very important to who leads you, and double spending is a very good words. We can imagine a lot of the data is unintentionally, they used to buy third party or something which we need to be considered that these times.

Yeah so that’s very good pointed out, we want you to move to this question to the government right that I think in COVID19, a lot of the government is that try to collect enough data to surveillance, they’re worried to where it happens to pandemics.

Of course, it’s very important to comprehend the status of the citizens where they’re living, where they’re walking out but I think we need to be paid attention to how coverage the government is it doing at this moment.

Yes, so we need to learn from the Canadian government, I guess, they are President is gonna say that to the movies they try to be strong to protect the Consumer Rights and Privacy, which is a very great announcement.

So how’s a Canadian government is working on this situation to protect the citizens of privacy. Regarding the privacy Commissioner, Data Protection Act, anything is in the working there?

・How Canadian government prevent the privacy?

Vicki: Right, right. So, Canada, you know, Canada is an interesting country because we have of course a federal government but we also have provincial governments that also have legislated and provide regulations in the area of privacy and they also are the ones that are responsible for delivering health care. So when you’re looking at what’s going on across Canada, it’s a very, it’s not a homogenous picture, it’s very diverse.

First at the federal level. There was an announcement, I think it was June 18 when the announcement was made from our Prime Minister’s Office, that the federal government was going to support a contact tracing app, or an approach to contact tracing that leverages the Google-Apple API, you may be familiar with that API that was built and remember that we discussed it during our COVID-19 witness seminar that you participated in, that we bought experts from around the world, including you.

Thank you very much for participating in that, Ann Cavoukian, who was a Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and is well known globally as the developer of Privacy by Design spoke very favorably about the Google, Apple API feeling that you know, it really had been developed with many privacy protections and so on. So, the federal government, working with a Canadian company called Shopify, which had developed an application that leverages the Google, Apple API, they’ve made it.

They’ve said that they’ll make this open source; t.hey prefer not to be the the owner of app, they want to make it available. What the government has decided to do is to trial that out in Ontario so the Ontario government is going to be giving that app a try, but they’re also at the same time they have asked a Canadian company, BlackBerry, to take a very detailed look, to do a privacy Impact Assessment and a security review of the application.

But because Canada’s very, you know the provinces, each tackle things in their own way. The province of Alberta had even before this, they had developed another app called ABTrace Together. This app also uses Bluetooth, but it wasn’t using the Apple, Google API.

It was developed pre-release of the Apple-Google API so before it was developed. And so they ran into some difficulties because the Bluetooth wouldn’t run in the background, because of the way that the devices have been set up and configured.

So, when you get a phone call or something like that, you know, the connection would be interfered with so there’s some concerns around the accuracy of the data so on. I don’t know whether they will continue to use ABTraceTogether or whether they will pivot towards the Shopify app Apple-Google API.

Or whether they will even roll out anything at all. I mean that’s, you know, it’s definitely a choice in each province as to how they actually approach this. I think there’s some convergence towards a more standardized approach within Canada but you know that there’s a consultation going on between the public health officials and the various officials as to what a standardized approach might look like. But there’s no definite agreement at this point in British Columbia.

We haven’t rolled out any contact tracing app, or our discussions about maybe doing some trialing of, you know, something like the Shopify Google-Apple API in a very limited localized basis to see how people respond to it, see how it works.

So I think we remain very cautious about the use of these apps in Canada. Certainly the government is being very respectful of the people’s concerns around privacy. Excessive government surveillance, you know, not using technologies that would be, you know, would enable that. So, lots of consultation is taking place.

And very cautious movements towards using this technology. I would say in Ontario where they’re trialing it, you know, that’s where the numbers of cases have been among the highest, and where you can justify, you know, why there’s a number of cases the risk is higher, the public health concerns are higher.

So it makes more sense to use an app like this, whereas in British Columbia, as I was saying to you before we started, you know, the number of cases we are only getting 13 new cases a day here at the moment, and we’ve already started to open up.

So, that level of contact tracing doesn’t require, you know, rolling out a huge, making a huge technological investment, you can track down the number of people related to these cases still using manual methods so the governments are looking at all of these things;

They’re looking at the risk level, the numbers of cases to be tracked, how effective the technology is, and what the effect is on privacy and how people are responding to it. So that’s what’s happening here in Canada.

To be continued..

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