“Privacy in the Age of AI: What’s changed and what should we do about it?”
Location: 177 Huntington Ave, conference room 503
Abstract: Privacy is a core tenet for engineering ethical AI products, but does AI change privacy risk? If so, what barriers do practitioners face in their privacy work for AI products? What are ways we might address these barriers? Without an answer to these questions, we cannot hope to engineer privacy-respecting AI products. In this talk, I will first codify how the unique capabilities and requirements of AI technologies create new privacy risks (e.g., non-consensual intimate imagery, physiognomic classifiers) and exacerbate known ones (e.g., surveillance, aggregation). I will then present an interview study, where we found industry practitioners of AI often have little awareness of the ways in which it can create new or exacerbating existing privacy threats and have little support for AI-specific privacy work. Finally, I will present my lab’s emerging work on “Privacy through Design” — exploring how we might develop turnkey design tools that help practitioners foreground and mitigate privacy risks in their AI design concepts.
Bio: Sauvik Das is an Assistant Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he directs the Security, Privacy, Usability and Design Lab. His work — at the intersection of HCI, AI, and cybersecurity — is oriented around answering the question: How can we design systems that empower people with improved agency over their personal data and experiences online? His work has been recognized with several awards: a best paper at UbiComp (2013) and CHI (2024), a distinguished paper at SOUPS (2020) and USENIX Security (2024), an honorable mention for the NSA’s Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper (2014), and five additional best paper honorable mention awards at CHI and CSCW. He has received an NSF CAREER award and is Non-Resident Fellow of the Center for Democracy and Technology. His work has also been covered by the popular press, including features in The Atlantic, The Financial Times, ABC, and others.