Ran Canetti was interviewed by WCVB Channel 5
Professor Ran Canetti, Computer Science, CAS and the Director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security (RISCS) was interviewed by Nicole Estephan of WCVB Channel 5’s Chronicle magazine and shared his opinion about the Facebook listening issue on July 22, 2019.
When people find out that the ads that appear are normally things they searched before, they feel scary. According to Mark Zuckerberg in the exchange with the Congress, he explained that Facebook only collects the data when users are taking a video with audio and Facebook only collects data information from these audios to provide better service. Ran gave further clarification about this issue.
“The Facebook is listening to whether you are in a noisy public environment or a private environment to better show you ads”, said Ran Canetti, “that means they are listening but they are making limited use of what they are listening to.”
Canetti also explained why Facebook can know details about your life. He said that the algorithms that are used to learn one thing from the data can bring more information than the data itself, and can produce riches that owners do not expect. It is not because the computer is smarter than us. The computer is only crunching numbers and provides us interpretations that we cannot make by ourselves.
Ran’s research interests span multiple aspects of cryptography and information security, with emphasis on the design, analysis and the use of cryptographic protocols.
Housed within the Hariri Institute for Computing, RISCS is to promote and coordinate research and education in system reliability and information security by emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach that included fields as diverse as reliable and secure computations, engineering, economics, ethics, and law.