Security News > 2022 > May > Privacy pathology: It's time for the users to gather a little data – evidence

According to the research paper by Trinity College Dublin computer science professor Douglas Leith, the company had been gathering far too much user data from core messaging apps, and the forensic analysis of the network flow extracted a well-deserved mea culpa from Mountain View.

The complexity of this system is matched by the lack of transparency over how it works, much as the charming simplicity of using Alexa - you just gab at it - hides how it works.

The researchers had to design a complicated melange of hardware and software, including the obligatory Raspberry Pi, to load test data into the system and monitor what happened as a result.

By now, there's little argument that a new, legitimate and pressing field of forensic computer science is evolving, that of discovering and characterizing abuses of personal privacy and consent.

As chemists, physicists and biologists share techniques and data sets just as much as they do individual findings, a priority of this new science of data privacy must be to recognise itself as a field and start to curate its knowledge and aim for collective process.

There is no Nobel prize for any sort of computing, let alone the new science of data privacy.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/05/03/opinion_column_privacy/