Publications

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

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.

Switzerland’s E-ID journey so far In 2021, the Swiss E-ID law proposition was rejected by a public referendum. The reason for the refusal was due to privacy concerns in the implementation and management of that system. In a nutshell, the idea that a private entity would be in control of…

This book explores China's agenda to establish itself as a cyber superpower through their strategic data governance approach, which, the author Aynne Kokas suggests, could pose a threat to global data autonomy.

For this Factory Update called “Ethical EOF” we invited Sylvain from Prof. Carmela Troncoso’s SPRING lab. He gave us an introduction to “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)”. We learnt how it can be used in privacy-preserving technologies (PET). Sylvain presented a use case to us which is federated learning. As FHE…

Part of the work of the C4DT Factory is the creation of demonstrators (proof of concepts) of technology coming out of the EPFL/IC labs. After two years we archive them and provide you with the means to easily run the demo on your computer instead. That way the demo remains…

This report summarizes the key results of the 2. Workshop on Digital Service Public held with 20 stakeholders from Swiss public administration, politics, industry, interest groups, civil society and academia.

As part of our work on the digital public service in Switzerland, we have written an initial working paper in which we focused in particular on the question of the future of the traditional service public in the context of progressive platformization.

Julia Rebstein, a student from the GymInf program, just finished and presented her project “Trace(r)s on the web – Julia Rebstein“. In it, she explains how different types of cookies work, and looks at a 1-week sample of browsing sessions from 10 persons. Under the supervision of Linus Gasser and…

In this issue brief, C4DT Digital Trust Policy Fellow Leonila Guglya examines international digital product regulations that are of key relevance to the ICT community, such as mandatory disclosure of source code, use of cryptography, cybersecurity standards, and nondiscrimination rules.

In this book lawyer Jamie Susskind addresses the issue of the unaccountable power exerted by Big Tech. Susskind problematizes the fundamental challenges that the engineers who design and control digital technology pose to democratic power and legitimacy.