Title: Online publication of court records: circumventing the privacy-transparency trade-off

Abstract: The open data movement is leading to the massive publishing of court records online, increasing transparency and accessibility of justice, and to the design of legal technologies building on the wealth of legal data available. However, the sensitive nature of legal decisions also raises important privacy issues. Current practices solve the resulting privacy versus transparency trade-off by combining access control with (manual or semi-manual) text redaction. In this work, we claim that current practices are insufficient for coping with massive access to legal data (restrictive access control policies is detrimental to openness and to utility while text redaction is unable to provide sound privacy protection) and advocate for a integrative approach that could benefit from the latest developments of the privacy-preserving data publishing domain. We present a thorough analysis of the problem and of the current approaches, and propose a straw man multimodal architecture paving the way to a full-fledged privacy-preserving legal data publishing system.

Bio: Louis Béziaud is a PhD student at IRISA, Univ Rennes (France) and the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) working under the supervision of Tristan Allard and Sébastien Gambs on privacy and fairness issues of artificial intelligence in law and justice.