MediaFutures invites you to join us for a talk with PhD candidate Tomasz Kosinski, Chalmers University of Technology. The topic of his talk is privacy controls for the IoT systems we are surrounded by.

Welcome to all!

TITLE: Should we have PETs in “smart” homes?
WHEN: 20 May 2021, 13:00-14:00
WHERE: https://uib.zoom.us/j/66870039042?pwd=TElra0ZlL0dFaFlaMFh5TjJ3dklmdz09
Meeting ID: 668 7003 9042
Password: 2vDBE%p%

ABSTRACT: This talk is not a lecture. The goal is to use plain English. Why? To simply convey some practical information and insights. About what? On Privacy Enhancing Technologies; PETs for short. What for? So that you can answer the question in the title for yourself. (Correct, I won’t do this one for you.) Why should you care to listen? Will it matter if you don’t? To whom? And what to use PETs for? Can it be applied to an Amazon Echo or Google Home? A “smart” lightbulb or your “smart” TV? All of them? These questions I’ll strive to answer. And I hope you will have more. Especially that in this popular science format, I will touch upon topics that should resonate with each of you and that are not limited to dark, dusty and narrow university corridors or Ivory towers. Tangible examples of this include reports of The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerrådet, regarding consumer-unfriendly practices. Similarly, recent NRK reports on location tracking through smartphone apps illustrate some issues that will be brought up in the talk.

BIO: The guy who will insist on not answering the question in the title is currently a pre-graduation PhD candidate. He’s based at Chalmers, a Swedish technical university located in Gothenburg. His core background is in Computer Science. The pre-PhD excursions involved software engineering, embedded systems, quadcopters, AI methods, human-robot and human-computer interaction. During the PhD time, he learned a bit about human studies (with mixed methods), scrutinizing smartphone apps (on Android) and analyzing the data showing what IoT devices tend to send over networks. Oh, and we didn’t bother asking about his off-work interests, since his PhD is on Privacy. You better follow him on social media for that.