Online registration for this event is now closed. Walk-in registration will be available on site beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Hosted by the Data Sciences Institute and the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University

In 1999, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, reportedly said about the new age of internet connectivity: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”  However many fear that individuals have largely lost the option of anonymity. While customers value their privacy, they give it away or trade it at low value in practice. Companies are able to monetize the value of this private information because they can aggregate, analyze this information for their use and sell and trade it to third parties. Meanwhile, customers routinely fail to understand the confusing privacy clauses in online licenses and have difficulty in knowing if the big data predictions about them are biased, accurate, or fair.

On February 5th, 2016, the Data Science Institute and the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University are hosting a research-inspired conference to answer a few fundamental questions about privacy, big data, and predictive modeling to turn this situation around.  How can we use data to improve privacy for individuals? Can we tell how companies are using our data and which ones are offering better protection? Do government agencies, such as the FTC or the Bureau of Financial Protection, have any impact on improving individual privacy?  Have researchers or entrepreneurs proposed solutions to improving data protection for customers?

In summary, is there evidence that indicates that Scott McNealy may be wrong?

Confirmed Speakers Include:

• Kate Crawford, Principal Researcher at MSR-NYC and Visiting Professor, MIT Center for Civic Media
• Brenda L Dietrich, Ph.D. IBM Fellow, Vice President, Data Science
• Abhay Edlabadkar '07, Founder at RedMorph
• Roxana Geambasu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University
• Arvind Narayanan, Computer Scientist at Princeton University
• Deirdre Mulligan, Professor of Information at UC Berkeley School of Information
• Claudia Perlich, Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery
• Irfan Saif, Principal at Deloitte
• Ashkan Soltani, Former Senior Advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Independent Researcher 

Faculty, please contact leadershipethics@gsb.columbia.edu to register.