Together with Samuel Sousa (Graz University of Technology) and Roman Kern (Know-Center GmbH), Christian Guetl (member of Open Search Foundation and Head of CoDiS Lab, TU Graz) published an article about the challenges and solutions of privacy in Open Search.

Here is the abstract:

“Privacy is of worldwide concern regarding activities and processes that include sensitive data. For this reason, many countries and territories have been recently approving regulations controlling the extent to which organizations may exploit data provided by people. Artificial intelligence areas, such as machine learning and natural language processing, have already successfully employed privacy-preserving mechanisms in order to safeguard data privacy in a vast number of applications. Information retrieval (IR) is likewise prone to privacy threats, such as attacks and unintended disclosures of documents and search history, which may cripple the security of users and be penalized by data protection laws.

This work aims at highlighting and discussing open challenges for privacy in the recent literature of IR, focusing on tasks featuring user-generated text data. Our contribution is threefold: firstly, we present an overview of privacy threats to IR tasks; secondly, we discuss applicable privacy-preserving mechanisms which may be employed in solutions to restrain privacy hazards; finally, we bring insights on the tradeoffs between privacy preservation and utility performance for IR tasks.”

The paper was accepted at #ossym2021 – Third International Open Search Symposium
Autors: Samuel Sousa, Christian Guetl, Roman Kern

Read the full article at arXivLabs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10720

Carla Hustedt at #ossym21

Werner Stengg at #ossym21

Video recordings

Astrid Mager at #ossym21

“Calls for a European “third way” in matters of digital technology need to be put into action to achieve an actual change of the status quo. To achieve autonomy in the digital sphere, European alternatives to digital services and products need to be established. However, such efforts must also extend to the level of information technology infrastructure. To that end, decentralized indexing of the internet could significantly help to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty. Nevertheless, legal challenges need to be overcome to make that vision a reality.”

Kai Erenli, Christian Geminn and Leon Pfeiffer from osf’s Legal group have written a very worthwhile article about the legal challenges of an open search infrastructure.

Erenli, K., Geminn, C. & Pfeiffer, L.
Legal challenges of an open web index.
International Cybersecurity Law Review volume 2, pages 183–194 (2021)

Direkt zum Artikel (englisch): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1365/s43439-021-00017-8