Sébastien Gambs
Canada Research Chair in Privacy and Ethical Analysis of Massive Data
Sébastien Gambs has held the Canada Research Chair in Privacy and Ethical Analysis of Massive Data since December 2017, and has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal since January 2016. His main research theme is privacy in the digital world. He is also interested in resolving long-term scientific questions such as the existing tensions between massive data analysis and privacy, as well as ethical issues such as fairness, transparency and algorithmic accountability raised by personalized systems.
Privacy and ethical issues in the age of massive data
In our Information Society, user profiling for personalization and recommendation purposes has become the norm, enabling the development of services that are targeted to the specific needs of individuals, but also raise important ethical and privacy issues. In particular, the lack of transparency about the profiling and personalization process has led to a loss of control by individuals over the collection and use made of their personal data, while making it impossible for an individual to question the decision taken by the algorithm and make him or her "accountable" for that decision. In addition, transparency is a prerequisite for being able to analyze the possible biases that personalization algorithms might have (for example, by discriminating against a particular group of the population) with a view to subsequently correcting them.
In this presentation, I will review the main challenges in terms of ethical and privacy issues that have emerged recently, before presenting the main approaches that have been proposed to meet these challenges. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting a few open questions.