Security and privacy for the disoriented

Ben Lorica

5 years ago

The Data Exchange Podcast: Dan Geer and Andrew Burt on security and privacy in the age of machine learning and AI.

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In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Dan Geer, Senior Fellow at In-Q-tel and Andrew Burt, co-founder and Managing Partner of BNH.ai¹ and Chief Legal Officer at Immuta. Dan is one the leading experts in cybersecurity and risk management, and he has written numerous influential essays on security, privacy, and risk (examples here and here). Andrew serves as co-founder of a new law firm focused on AI compliance and related topics. BNH is the first law firm run by lawyers and technologists focused on helping companies identify and mitigate those risks.

Are you using AI Responsibly? Andrew Burt was part of a stellar lineup of speakers at our recent webinar “Responsible AI in Practice” —it’s free, and you can access the sessions on-demand.

Andrew and Dan have jointly written some of my favorite essays pertaining to risk and security and privacy, so I was thrilled to have a far ranging three-way conversation with them. Here are some articles jointly written by Dan and Andrew:

We covered a range of topics touching on security and privacy, particularly in the context of data, machine learning and AI. We began with their thoughts on data fusion:

You put this piece of data with that, with another, with another and pretty soon there’s there’s no hiding … A game I have actually played on stage twice, was to pick a member of the audience and begin asking 20 questions. But the questions each of them were … sort of vaguely revealing … And nobody gets to 20 before they object. Because the point is, you start combining all these seeming non sequiturs. And you get a kind of a biographical picture, that is beyond what most people would want to do. So that is the power of putting data together.
… The question is, how can we protect our data writ large? And how can we protect our data from inferences that we are not comfortable with third parties making. Inferences that we might not even know or suspect are available.

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