Economic Analysis and Statistical Disclosure Limitation

This paper explores the consequences for economic research of methods used by data publishers to protect the privacy of their respondents. We review the concept of statistical disclosure limitation for an audience of economists who may be unfamiliar with these methods. We characterize what it means for statistical disclosure limitation to be ignorable. When it is not ignorable, we consider the effects of statistical disclosure limitation for a variety of research designs common in applied economic research. Because statistical agencies do not always report the methods they use to protect confidentiality, we also characterize settings in which statistical disclosure limitation methods are discoverable; that is, they can be learned from the released data. We conclude with advice for researchers, journal editors, and statistical agencies

Fundamental Rights of workers in the Digital Age: A methodological approach from a case study. WP C.S.D.L.E. "Massimo D'Antona" .INT - 89/2011

The relationship between employer and worker is not only obligatory but above all, as Sinzheimer said, a ‘relationship of power’. In the Digital Age this statement is confirmed by the massive introduction of ICT in most of the companies that increase, in practice, employer’s supervisory powers. This is a worrying issue for two reasons: on one hand, ICT emerge as a new way to weaken the effectiveness of fundamental rights and the right to dignity of workers; and, on the other hand, Spanish legal system does not offer appropriate solutions to ensure that efficacy. Moreover, in a scenario characterized by a hybridization of legal systems models –in which traditional hard law methods are combined with soft law and self regulation instruments–, the role of our case law has become very important in this issue. Nevertheless, despite the increase of judicialization undergone, solutions offered by Courts are so different that do not give enough legal certainty. Facing this situation, I suggest a methodological approach –using Alchourron and Bulygin’s normative systems theory and Alexy’s fundamental rights theory– which can open new spaces of decision to legal operators in order to solve properly these problems. This proposal can allow setting a policy that guarantees fundamental rights of workers, deepening their human freedom in companies from the Esping-Andersen’s de-commodification perspective. With this purpose, I examine electronic communications in the company as a case study

A formal definition and a new security mechanism of physical unclonable functions

The characteristic novelty of what is generally meant by a "physical unclonable function" (PUF) is precisely defined, in order to supply a firm basis for security evaluations and the proposal of new security mechanisms. A PUF is defined as a hardware device which implements a physical function with an output value that changes with its argument. A PUF can be clonable, but a secure PUF must be unclonable. This proposed meaning of a PUF is cleanly delineated from the closely related concepts of "conventional unclonable function", "physically obfuscated key", "random-number generator", "controlled PUF" and "strong PUF". The structure of a systematic security evaluation of a PUF enabled by the proposed formal definition is outlined. Practically all current and novel physical (but not conventional) unclonable physical functions are PUFs by our definition. Thereby the proposed definition captures the existing intuition about what is a PUF and remains flexible enough to encompass further research. In a second part we quantitatively characterize two classes of PUF security mechanisms, the standard one, based on a minimum secret read-out time, and a novel one, based on challenge-dependent erasure of stored information. The new mechanism is shown to allow in principle the construction of a "quantum-PUF", that is absolutely secure while not requiring the storage of an exponentially large secret. The construction of a PUF that is mathematically and physically unclonable in principle does not contradict the laws of physics.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, Conference Proceedings MMB & DFT 2012, Kaiserslautern, German

Citizen Rights and the Cost of Law Enforcement

There is an inherent tension between the idea that individuals have certain inalienable (natural) rights and the economist's postulate that the rate if utilization of anything whose production requires scarce resources must be limited by considerations of opportunity cost. Remarks about rights to life, liberty, health, justice and the like are readily inserted into political pronouncements, legislative preambles and court decisions, but they (should) cause economists to raise questions about costs and quantities. Unfortunately, neither in ordinary language nor in the jargon of moral philosophy can such ultimate desiderata as liberty and justice be related to costs or quantities. Hence in the first section we sketch a model of social choice in which the necessary relationships can be defined. In section II, we give instances where, despite protestations to the contrary, the Law Enforcement System (LES) has made de facto reductions of citizen rights (liberties) in order to increase the efficiency if law enforcement. The final section considers some of the normative implications suggested by the positive arguments of section II.

XML content warehousing: Improving sociological studies of mailing lists and web data

In this paper, we present the guidelines for an XML-based approach for the sociological study of Web data such as the analysis of mailing lists or databases available online. The use of an XML warehouse is a flexible solution for storing and processing this kind of data. We propose an implemented solution and show possible applications with our case study of profiles of experts involved in W3C standard-setting activity. We illustrate the sociological use of semi-structured databases by presenting our XML Schema for mailing-list warehousing. An XML Schema allows many adjunctions or crossings of data sources, without modifying existing data sets, while allowing possible structural evolution. We also show that the existence of hidden data implies increased complexity for traditional SQL users. XML content warehousing allows altogether exhaustive warehousing and recursive queries through contents, with far less dependence on the initial storage. We finally present the possibility of exporting the data stored in the warehouse to commonly-used advanced software devoted to sociological analysis

The Challenges and Limitations of Conducting Research Among the Old Order Amish

The Old Order or horse and buggy Amish have been a part of American society for more than two centuries. Today, some 95,000 Amish persons reside in over twenty states, a Canadian province, and two countries in Latin America. Although variations exist in the social values and behavioral practices within different Amish communities (or church districts), they have basically resisted the acculturation process that would reinforce and promote a standard of living and lifestyle embraced by most of the non-Amish in the U.S

Réputation et respect de la vie privée dans les réseaux dynamiques auto-organisés

Reputation mechanisms are very powerful mechanisms to foster trust between unknown users, by rewarding good behaviors and punishing bad ones. Reputation mechanisms must guarantee that the computed reputation scores are precise and robust against attacks; to guarantee such properties, existing mechanisms require information that jeopardize users' privacy: for instance, clients' interactions might be tracked. Privacy-preserving reputation mechanisms have thus been proposed, protecting both clients' privacy and the providers' one. However, to guarantee strong privacy properties, these mechanisms provide imprecise reputation scores, particularly by preventing clients to testify about their negative interactions. In this thesis, we propose a new distributed privacy-preserving reputation mechanism allowing clients to issue positive as well as negative feedback. Such a construction is made possible thanks to tools from the distributed systems community -- distributed third parties that allow for a distribution of trust and that tolerate malicious behaviors -- as well as from the cryptographic one -- for instance zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge or anonymous proxy signatures. Furthermore, we prove that our mechanism guarantees the required privacy and security properties, and we show with theoretical and practical analysis that this mechanism is usable.Les mécanismes de réputation sont des outils très utiles pour inciter des utilisateurs ne se connaissant pas à se faire confiance, en récompensant les bons comportements et, inversement, en pénalisant les mauvais. Cependant, pour que la réputation des fournisseurs de service soit précise et robuste aux attaques, les mécanismes de réputation existants requièrent de nombreuses informations qui menacent la vie privée des utilisateurs; par exemple, il est parfois possible de traquer les interactions effectuées par les clients. Des mécanismes de réputation préservant aussi bien la vie privée des clients que celle des fournisseurs sont donc apparus pour empêcher de telles attaques. Néanmoins, pour garantir des propriétés fortes de vie privée, ces mécanismes ont dû proposer des scores de réputation imprécis, notamment en ne permettant pas aux clients de témoigner de leurs interactions négatives.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un nouveau mécanisme de réputation distribué préservant la vie privée, tout en permettant aux clients d'émettre des témoignages négatifs. Une telle construction est possible grâce à des outils issus des systèmes distribués -- des tierces parties distribuées qui permettent de distribuer la confiance et de tolérer des comportements malveillants -- et de la cryptographie -- par exemple des preuves de connaissance à divulgation nulle de connaissance ou des signatures proxy anonymes. Nous prouvons de plus que ce mécanisme garantit les propriétés de vie privée et de sécurité nécessaires, et montrons par des analyses théoriques et pratiques que ce mécanisme est utilisable