On Saturday, March 17, 2018, The Guardian and The New York Times both reported that a political research and data science firm called Cambridge Analytica had inappropriately harvested data from the Facebook profiles of over 50 million people—the vast majority of whom had not provided consent for their data to be used for political and psychological profiling. 

We’re here to provide both technical and policy background on the Cambridge Analytica (CA) incident to illustrate the extent and potential harms of the user data that was stolen, and to provide some ideas for the way forward.

Understanding data privacy risk by re-identifying a series of purportedly anonymized datasets.

MIT’s interdisciplinary Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) awarded $1.5 million to researchers across campus working Internet policy and cybersecurity-related research projects.

Data trust and innovation at the DHS Cyber Security Division

This course brings together engineering students from MIT with law students from Georgetown Law School to explore current issues in privacy policy and technology. Interdisciplinary teams, consisting of law students and MIT students, prepare a detailed legal assessment of policy questions, researching and explaining the technological frameworks and challenges associated with the policy question, and then formulating policy and technological recommendations to address the question in the form of draft state legislation.

Canadian CRTC head Jean-Pierre Blais and Internet pioneer and MIT Senior Research Scientist David Clark discussed the past, present, and future of Canadian telecom policy and its relationship with the U.S.

In its announcement today, ACM cited Tim Berners-Lee for “inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale.” Tim leads the Decentralized Information Group and is a principal investigator in IPRI.

MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative hosted a discussion in March 2017 with ProPublica’s Julia Angwin on algorithmic accountability and the role of machine learning in societal decisions, including criminal sentencing.

Engineering and law students jointly explore current issues in privacy policy and develop draft legislation that could be adopted by state governments.