AI and the Future of Privacy

Please join the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Ash Center’s Allen Lab and Connection Science at MIT Media Lab for a workshop series event focused on “AI and the Future of Privacy”. In this session, we’ll hear from Bruce Schneier, security technologist, and Faculty Affiliate at the Ash Center; Sarah Roth-Gaudette, Executive Director of Fight for the Future; and Tobin South, MIT Ph.D. Candidate and Fulbright Scholar. Each presenter will give a lightning talk, followed by an audience Q&A.

About the Speakers

​​Sarah Roth-Gaudette’s diverse background encompasses 25+ years of supervisory, administrative, campaign product and tech development, communications, and fundraising experience. She ran the Public Interest Network’s fundraising and field canvass operation, where she raised more than $20 million in grassroots income annually, employing thousands of staff and innovating new technologies for grassroots mobilization. She has also led many volunteer-driven voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, and was one of the first employees of MoveOn.org’s PAC, where she developed new models for neighbor-to-neighbor canvassing and precinct leader organizing still widely used today. She now heads the digital rights advocacy organization, Fight for the Future, which uses a combination of innovative technology, communications and alliance-building to move millions to take action. The group developed the strategy and online tools that were used to drive nearly four million comments to the FCC, playing a central role in winning net neutrality in 2015, and harnessing the massive cross-partisan backlash to its 2017 repeal through its viral BattleForTheNet.com campaign. FFTF has also dealt major blows to commercial and government facial recognition technology, including successful campaigns that kept facial recognition off 60 college and university campuses, and halting its use at 40 major music festivals.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He is the New York Times best-selling author of 14 books — including A Hacker’s Mind — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow, and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Tobin South is a PhD candidate at MIT on a Fulbright Future Scholarship advised by Sandy Pentland in the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab and Connection Science in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He works at the intersection of data, privacy, AI, and society. In particular, he is focused on building privacy, security, verifiability, and regulatory compliance into frontier AI from first principles. His work has spanned across fields, from decentralized private data sharing to verifiable evaluation attestations for large AI models. He has contributed to the recent work on regulation for generative AI and is keenly interested in working on practically deployable solutions to solve privacy and security challenges in a changing world of technology.

About the Series

The aim of this workshop series is to assist policymakers and students in obtaining the most up-to-date knowledge about the impacts of artificial intelligence on society and democracy, in order to improve their ability to shape global public policy. The workshops will be delivered by experts from across academia, as well as public and private sectors.

Event Details

This event is online only, and registration is required. A recording will be made available after the event’s conclusion.

The Ash Center encourages individuals with disabilities to participate in its events. Should you wish to enquire about an accommodation, please contact our events team at info@ash.harvard.edu prior to the event.