Cybersecurity Without Barriers
This January, TPP students Shreeya Parekh and Nicola Lawford designed and taught the cybersecurity workshop Ciberseguridad Sin Barreras: Protecting Every Byte and Right at Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City.
What is the focus of your research? What sort of knowledge and disciplines does it bring together? How will it make an impact?
Nicola: Right now, I do user research for consumer privacy tools at MIT CSAIL’s Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI). We’re working with advocacy organization Consumer Reports and industry partners to build tools that allow consumers to trace and control uses and sharing of their personal data. We’re using human-computer interaction and software design methods to go beyond legal compliance and help consumers exercise their rights to privacy, accountability, and justice. Beginning in the context of open banking—data sharing between financial institutions and third parties—we hope that tracing how consumer data is used could go toward greater consumer privacy control, legal accountability for company overreach, and identification of discriminatory and predatory marketing in pursuit of justice and financial inclusion.
Shreeya: AT MIT, I conduct anthropological field research to understand the digital experiences of older adults, primarily in regards to banking habits. Skyrocketing instances of cyber fraud increases the online vulnerability of many, especially communities with limited access or experience to digital technology. In order to create better interventions to protect the financial security of older adults, we conduct fieldwork to gather data on older adult experiences with fraud in the greater Boston area. Through social science methodologies, we can better understand the victimization of certain marginalized communities. The data we collect will then help create policies and tools to empower older adults and bridge this digital divide in banking.
This IAP you taught a cybersecurity workshop at Universidad Panamericana. Who did you work with and what did you do?
We held a week-long intensive cybersecurity workshop to second- through fifth-year students in the Cybersecurity and Data Intelligence Engineering major at Universidad Panamericana. The topics included web security, cryptography, spyware, data privacy laws, and human rights implications of technology.
We opened each day with a discussion of cybersecurity news and fostered a collaborative learning environment through lab exercises and a self-guided project. The students brought a wealth of cybersecurity and data science knowledge and skills to the classroom. They made the classroom vibrant with their interests in human rights, philosophy, and cultural studies, teaching us more than we could teach them. Many of our students were eager and more than prepared to study alongside us at MIT, but had few opportunities to do so. We hope that this can change through more exchange partnerships in the future.
How did this experience connect to your current research and future plans?
From a human rights perspective, security and privacy are sister subjects. We worked with our students on hands-on activities and discussions that asked questions like: “how do software applications and hardware devices gather data about us?”, “What is the value of this data for monetization, surveillance, and human rights?”, and “What are our technical and legal defenses?”
The workshop participant’s input on these timely considerations provided us with wider perspectives on our research projects. While both of our research projects have themes of participatory design, empowerment, and financial justice, the work has mainly focused on participants from the United States. While Global North experiences are often easy to collect for researchers at MIT, we must understand the interactions between technology and people globally to create better, more inclusive technology policies.
These insights came in the midst of the new US Administration’s revisions in U.S. immigration policies. The contrast between the warmth with which we were welcomed to Mexico with contemporaneous news footage of ICE raids in Boston was striking and reminded us why an international and intersectional perspective is needed to address issues of human rights and technology, including privacy and cybersecurity. The joys of collaboration and discussion with our students moved us to continue to pursue teaching and human rights work
Watch the Universidad Panamericana Instagram post featuring Nicola and Shreeya.
