Privacy Talk with Christopher Gorog, CEO BlockFrame Inc and Chair IEEE Digital Privacy Initiative : How do you envision IEEE Digital Privacy work?
“This interview recorded on 20th April 2023 is talking about privacy and blockchain.”
Kohei is having great time discussing privacy and blockchain.
This interview outline:
- What is your role at IEEE Digital Privacy?
- What IEEE Digital Privacy has been working since January 2022?
- How do you envision IEEE Digital Privacy work?
- What is your role at IEEE Digital Privacy?
Chris: Sure, we’re now in our second full year, but our third year of operation because we started out as a small project under Future Directions and then we became an initiative, in the beginning of 2022.
（Movie: Digital Privacy Panel at IEEE SMC 2022）
And 2023 is our second year. So we’ve been growing as far as building the community around digital privacy trying to understand all the pieces. So you know the first year I mean, I came in with my work from a state program saying, well, I need to answer these questions.
And I had a set of 20 or so questions I need to answer but it was a bigger picture than me. It was a societal question. It was a technologist question. It was a question for a community of people. So we started asking those questions.
And then the first year of the project, we had a workshop where we said okay, let’s see, are we asking all the questions and pull the industry across IEEE, all the different organizational units that handle different technologies.
And say, are there questions we’re missing? Is there a question that we need to be asking? And now our list has expanded to like 70 of those. So that is the you know the technology areas which we call the dimensions of privacy, they’re polar opposites, like public and private, like opt in versus opt out are two polar opposites.
And we know that’s a dimension of decision making. And then in the second year, we looked at the first year, the full project, we organized the different working groups, so we organized three industry subgroups, for automotive, for energy and for healthcare.
And we just picked those because they are the ones that seem to be the most in need of privacy under our scope but I’m sure there are many more. That was just kind of the first three we chose and then we have a policy and legislative group that looks at how the policies are organized and how they are interfacing with government organizations that might make legislative actions on policy.
And they’re starting those conversations. They’re starting to attend meetings with legislators and conferences and what not, and put together a map around using privacy and how it fits together. Then we have a framework working group that looks at frameworks around the data for individual users.
- What IEEE Digital Privacy has been working since January 2022?
And we have a standard working group that has just started up and then some outreach as another so we have what altogether, six or seven working groups and put together a community presence with IEEE, put together a webpage we have quite a bit of engagements.
People like yourself on there speaking at podcasts, to get people’s awareness, and then we have a call for volunteers and people coming in who have an interest in one of those areas or furthering the state of the art in one of those areas.
And that’s what we’re doing with digital privacy. We are focusing on bringing the technologists, the individual privacy for individuals. IEEE is an organization based on individual membership. It’s not paid for by governments or companies. It’s individuals of 415,000 members, IEEE, all contribute a little bit of money annually toward membership.
So we can say our money is in search of how to improve individuals’ privacy. And that’s kind of a big difference because a lot of the initiatives that already existed were about, you know, government regulation. Lawyers trying to understand the law and policy or big companies trying to manage and organize data and protect against compromise.
And really nothing was based that we had found at the time on the individual. So that’s kind of our position with Digital Privacy is the focus on our membership base, which is individually vested in the privacy of their own content.
Kohei: Through your working for almost one year, just you did a lot of the activities in the initiative within the group. So do you feel that any change in the United States of the atmosphere related to the privacy initiative because I think we are becoming sensitive of the privacy issues of your data and technology at this moment? So do you have any idea of that?
- How do you envision IEEE Digital Privacy work?
Chris: Well, even though we’ve started in, I started my work from the United States, I’m a United States citizen, the IEEE is really a global organization. So our effort isn’t solely focused in the United States.
We have a good bit of our contributing members in the first year were in the United States and say Europe, the West, but we’re, you know, this year, our second year, we’re doing a big outreach into other parts of the world.
Because one of the, you know, the big things we identified early on and initiative is that the social aspects that govern privacy, and the decisions that people make on privacy are very different, for different parts of the world.
People view privacy differently, and even between United States and Europe our two biggest contributors, regionally geographically in the first year. The United States is very in support of corporations, and protection of their rights to use data.
Europe and GDPR very much focuses on the protection of the individual consumer, almost in opposition to the companies and the company’s rights to their data saying that the user, the data target, the person the data is about, has certain rights to the data even though the company might be collecting it.
And those two polar opposites are very regional, geographical focused. And then even in Asia, there seems to be a third that’s more social and the consciousness of the society has more rights to the decision making on who makes the decision on what your data, which data is private, which data is public, how it’s handled.
And it comes down to it that a big part of the big unknown isn’t how to implement or how to do privacy. It’s how society anticipates that we’re supposed to handle privacy.
And those are a set of decisions that we can even outline what the decisions are but who makes those decisions?
And who they’re allowed to make it for, becomes assignable and changeable in different geography around the world in a big way. And there’s just different ideological points of view that come with the social changes in geographic regions of the world.
Kohei: That’s very interesting, because our country is also becoming sensitive, especially for the personal information, how the company deals with that it didn’t have, and how the government reacted with the privacy breach.
So in this sense, you publish with your team about the synthetic approach to digital privacy. On your documents, you mentioned about the several technologies such as blockchain, or other some of the new technical innovations.
I think privacy is one of the very important factors against technical innovations or receiving the innovation for the future. So what do you think about the necessary to achieve this document with the new technology with the privacy?
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