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Is the Future the P.I.T.s?: Implanting and Extracting Identity

Paul Van Oorschot, Canada Research Chair in Network and Software Security, and Professor of Computer Science, Carleton University moderated this panel, which comprised Michael Krawitz, Executive Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer of Applied Digital, Latanya Sweeney, Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa and Principal Investigator of the On the Identity Trail project.

Michael Krawitz spoke first and discussed the VeriChip produced by Applied Digital. He focused his discussion on the medical, financial and security uses and advantages of VeriChip. He described the example of seniors using VeriChip to contain health information so that doctors and hospitals can rely on the chip rather than the imperfect memory of the person. He compared the VeriChip to a medic-alert bracelet. In the financial context, he described how VeriChip can be used to protect against identity theft by acting as a secondary authentication device.
 
Latanya Sweeney provided an overview of her research areas and then focused on RFIDs and identity theft. She described how knowing a zip code, date of birth and gender can uniquely identify 87% of US population. She talked about her Identity Angel project, which scans the web to see if there is enough information available about a person to enable someone to commit a fraud or identity theft. The idea is to then contact the vulnerable person and make them aware of the problem. The Identity Angel project has found that online resumes contain personal information that could be used to commit identity theft. For example, 140 or 150 resumes were found with individuals' Social Security Numbers. 105 people of these people were contacted and advised of the issue and a variety of different replies from them were received, ranging from thanks to threats of lawsuit! She projected that the VeriChip will eventually create the same kinds of problems and purpose creep that are seen now in the data explosion and online databases. For example, restaurants will want to access medical information on a VeriChips to find out about allergies or amusement parks will want access to heart condition information.

Ian Kerr concluded this panel with his presentation "Still feelin 'icky': The Utopias of Conrad Chase, Kevin Warwick and other Digital Angels". He recounted his experience with the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona. This club was implanting customers with "VIP" chips, which permitted access to the VIP lounge at the club and enabled payment. Kerr's presentation considered what it might be like to live in a wireless world in which personal devices all talk to one another in an automated way that does not necessarily involve human intermediation. This would transform the world of local area networks to 'PANs' - Personal Area Networks. Kerr discussed Kevin Warwick's neural transducer surgical implants intended to send and receive signals from computers and others. Other implantable devices include insulin, cochlear implants (phones, MP3 players etc. can be linked). He pointed out that the nature of the information created in the PANs (like blood sugar, neural signals etc.) leads to heightened security and privacy concerns. He asked, "are we moving from the network of ideas, to the network of things, to the network of people?"

Download Presentations:

Latanya Sweeney, Beyond Ickiness is Risk: The Exasperation of Data Privacy Problems by RFID