When Things are Sensors for Cloud AI: Protecting Privacy Through Data Collection Transparency in the Age of Digital Assistants

The rapidly increasing number of intelligent, cloud-connected things that are embedded in our daily lives raises legitimate concerns about the privacy costs paid for the benefits these technologies provide. In this paper, we argue that this is a false choice, and motivate and describe a technology that enables citizens to effectively and conveniently monitor data collected about them. Our overarching goal is to expand awareness of the need to move from the current state of consumer ignorance or apprehensive trust to an era of data collection transparency (DCT), where consumers understand the data that is collected about them and make informed decisions based on that understanding. We show that DCT can be achieved with a suite of technologies built around recent developments in secure elements, as well as a virtual token methodology with public keys using addressable cryptographic tables.