Introducing Privacy-Protective Surveillance: Achieving Privacy and Effective Counter-Terrorism

This paper introduces the concept of Privacy-Protective Surveillance (PPS) – a positive-sum, “win-win” alternative to current counter-terrorism surveillance systems – and proposes a methodology for its implementation within the framework of Privacy by Design. Section 1 discusses the current context of counter-terrorism surveillance and presents the need for an alternative solution. Section 2 introduces the objectives and functionality of PPS, showing its relevance to the private sector and distinguishing its data analytics from others. Section 3 describes the feature detection abilities of the intelligent virtual agents used by PPS. Section 4 presents homomorphic encryption within the context of PPS’s analytics. Section 5 describes PPS’s ability to contextualize information through the use of probabilistic graphical models. Section 6 presents the two main phases of PPS in terms of its development and implementation. Section 7 highlights the main issues addressed by PPS and calls for the involvement of additional stakeholders to work towards refining and implementing its proposed methodology.

Authors:

Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D.
Information and Privacy Commissioner
Ontario, Canada

Khaled El Emam, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information
University of Ottawa

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