Publications

Matrix is a widely used open source chat platform. It is an alternative to platforms such as Slack and MSTeams. In line with C4DT’s objective to promote services in the realm of digital trust, we set up our own Matrix instance and migrated our professional communications there in 2019. A…

Schaake, Marietje (2024). The Tech Coup – How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Princeton University Press, 336 pages. By Melanie Kolbe-Guyot It is safe to say that probably no other book should more be on your reading list this year than Marietje Schaake’s 2024 “The Tech Coup – How to…

The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance by Carissa Véliz, Oxford University Press – 256 pages by Hector Garcia Morales “Privacy matters because it shields us from possible abuses of power”. Such a strong statement opens the introduction of the book, setting the grounds for the following pages. The thesis is…

Nearly seven years after the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, what impact has it had on data protection? What are the main legislative differences between the European Union and Switzerland? And how will the situation evolve as the rise of generative AI in…

Privacy Enhancing Technologies, or PETs for short, is an umbrella term for a wide range of technologies and tools designed to protect our privacy online. You may not realize it, but you probably already use PETs on a daily basis. Some common examples [1] include HTTPS, securing connections between you…

We’re thrilled to share the success of our recent hands-on workshop on crafting more privacy-preserving E-IDs! In the morning, Imad Aad from C4DT set the stage with an insightful overview of the importance of E-IDs and the essentials for ensuring their effectiveness. The afternoon sessions, led by Linus Gasser and Ahmed…

  One of our jobs at the C4DT Factory is to work on promising projects from our affiliated labs. This helps the faculties translate their research into formats accessible to different audiences. For a newly on-boarded project, we evaluate its current state and identify the required steps towards a final…

TLS or Transport Layer Security is the cryptographic protocol that allows your internet connected devices to contact any website or any API or cloud service securely (over HTTPs). It adds privacy to your connection, by encrypting the transferred data, and more importantly helps your computer make sure that it’s talking…

Investigative journalist Kashmir Hill traces the rise and consequences of facial-recognition company Clearview AI on the future of privacy.

On the 19th of June 2024 the C4DT Factory organized a hands-on workshop to show what can go wrong when Large Language Models (LLMs) are fine-tuned. It was a pleasure working with our partners from armasuisse, FOITT (BIT), ELCA, ICRC, Kudelski Security, SICPA, Swiss Post, and Swissquote. LLMs take the…

In this fourth part of the blog series “Swiss e-ID journey”, we give an overview of the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) [10] landscape in CH, EU, and beyond. This allows the reader to put the current effort of the e-ID in context with international efforts in references and implementations regarding e-ID…

C4DT Demonstrator using the Swiss Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure This is our third article about the Swiss e-ID Journey. An overview of the system can be found in our first article, Switzerland’s e-ID journey so far [1a], and an introduction to the first steps of using the sandbox [8] in…

The d-voting project from the DEDIS lab at EPFL is a decentralized voting system that leverages blockchain technology and cryptographic algorithms to ensure secure, transparent, and verifiable elections. By using a blockchain as the storage medium, the system allows multiple entities to oversee the election process and enables easy access…

The Swiss E-ID Journey This article is the second in a series of three articles which discusses C4DT’s experiences and takeaways testing the Swiss Confederation Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure, hereafter abbreviated as “sandbox”. In the first article, we looked over all the components of the sandbox, and its setup. In…

  Six years ago, EPFL rolled out an e-voting platform developed by Bryan Ford’s DEDIS lab for its internal elections [2]. The then newly-formed Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) brought this project as one of the first under the umbrella of its Digital-Trust Open Platform, the precursor to what is…

In diesem Policypaper gehen Matthias Finger und Melanie Kolbe-Guyot auf die Herausforderungen ein, die digitale Plattformen für die traditionellen Service public mit sich bringen. Sie schlagen handlungsfähige Strategien für politische Entscheidungsträger vor, um die Zugänglichkeit, Erschwinglichkeit und Nachhaltigkeit des bestehenden Service public zu gewährleisten.

In this policy paper, Matthias Finger and Melanie Kolbe-Guyot unpack the challenges that digital platforms bring to traditional service public sectors. They suggest actionable strategies for policymakers to ensure accessibility, affordability, and sustainability of the existing physical service public offerings.

This book offers an in-depth, objective analysis of the three dominant regulatory models for digitalization—market-driven by the US, state-driven by China, and citizen-driven by the EU—and their global impacts on data, digital platforms, and the internet, highlighting the current geo-political struggles and possible future scenarios.