S2E9: Personalized Noise, Decaying Photos, & Digital Forgetting with Apu Kapadia (Indiana University Bloomington)

The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

In this episode, I'm delighted to welcome Apu Kapadia, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University. His research is focused on the privacy implications of ubiquitous cameras and online photo sharing. More recently, he has examined the cybersecurity and privacy challenges posed by AI-based smart voice assistants that can listen and converse with us.

Prof. Kapadia has been excited by anonymized networks since childhood. He has memories of watching movies where a telephone call was being routed around the world so that it became impossible to trace. What really fascinates him now is how much there is to understand mathematically and technically in order to measure that amount of privacy. In more recent years, he has been interested in privacy in the context of digital photography and audio shared online and on social media. His current research is focused on understanding privacy issues around photo sharing in a world with cameras everywhere.
In this conversation, we delve into how users are affected once privacy violations have already occurred, the implications of privacy of children when it comes to parents sharing photos of them online, the fascinating future of trusted hardware that will help ensure "digital forgetting," and how all of this is a people problem as much as it is a technical problem.

Topics Covered:

• Can we trick 'automated speech recognition' (ASR)?
• Apu's co-authored paper: 'Defending Against Microphone-based Attacks with Personalized Noise'
• What Apu means by 'tangible privacy' & what design approaches he recommends
• Apu's view on 'bystander privacy' & the approach that he took in his research
• How to leverage 'temporal redactions' via 'trusted hardware' for 'digital forgetting'
• Apu’s surprising finding in his research on "interpersonal privacy" in the context of social media and photos
• Guidance for developers building privacy-respective social media apps
• Apu's research focused on cybersecurity & privacy for marginalized & vulnerable populations
• How we can make privacy & security more 'useable'

Resources Mentioned:

• Read Defending Against Microphone-Based Attacks with Personalized Noise
• Read Decaying Photos for Enhanced Privacy: User Perceptions Towards Temporal Redactions and 'Trusted' Platforms

Guest Info:

• Follow Prof. Kapadia on LinkedIn

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Chapters

1. S2E9: Personalized Noise, Decaying Photos, & Digital Forgetting with Apu Kapadia (Indiana University Bloomington) (00:00:00)

2. Introducing Apu Kapadia (00:01:15)

3. Apu describes his current research exploring security & privacy issues related to audio & voice (00:02:59)

4. Debra gives an overview of Apu's co-authored paper: 'Defending Against Microphone-based Attacks with Personalized Noise' (00:06:22)

5. Apu describes the approach he took to solve for these problems and the results of his research (00:08:01)

6. Apu explains what he means by 'tangible privacy' & what design approaches he recommends (00:15:01)

7. Apu explains what he means by 'bystander privacy' & the approach that he took in his research (00:17:53)

8. 'Digital Forgetting.' Apu describes research on 'temporal redactions' that can be applied through 'trusted hardware,' which he raised in his paper: "Decaying Photos for Enhanced Privacy: user perceptions towards temporal redactions & trusted platforms" (00:23:04)

9. Apu gives guidance for developers building privacy respective social media apps (00:29:35)

10. Apu tells us about his grant with The National Science Foundation with a focus on cybersecurity & privacy for marginalized & vulnerable populations (00:32:46)

11. Apu gives some use cases regarding his NSF research (00:35:08)

12. Apu describes his love and fascination for anonymizing networks like Tor (00:37:36)

13. Apu describes how we can make privacy & security more 'useable' (00:43:52)