A multi-group study led by University of California-Irvine researchers has received a $10 million grant to look into ways to protect individuals’ online information from misuse.
The research center, funded by the National Science Foundation, will be hosted by UCI and will collaborate with Northeastern University, the University of Iowa, the University of Southern California and Spain’s IMDEA Networks Institute.
“We can do things better going forward,” said principal investigator Athina Markopoulou, professor and chairperson of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UCI.
“With COVID we’re even more aware of data collection,” she told the Business Journal on June 16. Businesses and governments are stepping up monitoring and tracing to prevent further coronavirus outbreaks.
Networked World
The five-year study announced earlier this month will include a look at the “interaction of technology and policy,” and consider societal and economic implications of an increasingly networked world.
Data is shared with service providers, as well as with several trackers. Many useful services are enabled by the collection of these data, although increasingly at the expense of privacy, security, transparency, and fairness, for individuals and society, the researchers said.
“There is benign tracking going on, but there is also eavesdropping and malware,” Markopoulou said. “All of these actors have access to our data. We want to see how we can improve transparency and give some control to the users.”
She said current legal protections are going in “the right direction, but they need more input from technology to be meaningful.”
COVID-19, Unrest
The research center’s team also will create new software and hardware tools and produce policy recommendations to safeguard personal data collected by web servers, mobile applications and a broadening range of linked entities on the device-connected Internet of Things.
Research members include Markopoulou, who will apply her expertise in computer and mobile applications; Gene Tsudik, a computer science professor who has wide-ranging experience in cybersecurity; and Scott Jordan, professor of computer science, whose policy background includes work with the Federal Communications Commission and other government entities.
“The timing of this effort could hardly be more appropriate, as the current double whammy of COVID-19 pandemic and growing social unrest exacerbate and highlight the importance of personal privacy,” Tsudik said.
The UCI team will work to improve the transparency and control of personal data flow on the internet by combining methodologies from computer science and engineering—including theory, network measurement and systems security—with public policy and concepts from economics. They will also develop better systems for network monitoring and mediation.
California Law
Internet privacy has also caught the attention of state lawmakers in Sacramento with the California Consumer Privacy Act that took effect Jan. 1.
The law lets consumers know what personal data certain-sized businesses collect, and whether it’s being sold or disclosed. California consumers can also now deny the sharing of their information, and request deletion of their data.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra can start enforcing the law as early as July 1, according to the National Law Review.
