Privacy with Surgical Robotics: Challenges in Applying Contextual Privacy Theory

09/04/2019
by   Ryan Shah, et al.
0

The use of connected surgical robotics to automate medical procedures presents new privacy challenges. We argue that conventional patient consent protocols no longer work. Indeed robots that replace human surgeons take on an extraordinary level of responsibility. Surgeons undergo years of training and peer review in a strongly regulated environment, and derive trust via a patient's faith in the hospital system. Robots on the other hand derive trust differently, via the integrity of the software that governs their operation. From a privacy perspective, there are two fundamental shifts. First, the threat model has shifted from one where the humans involved were untrusted to one where the robotic software is untrusted. Second, the basic unit of privacy control is no longer a medical record, but is replaced by four new basic units: the subject on which the robot is taking action; the tools used by the robot; the sensors (i.e data) the robot can access; and, finally access to monitoring and calibration services which afford correct operation of the robot. We suggest that contextual privacy provides useful theoretical tools to solve the privacy problems posed by surgical robots. However, it also poses some challenges: not least that the complexity of the contextual-privacy policies, if rigorously specified to achieve verification and enforceability, will be exceedingly high to directly expose to humans that review contextual privacy policies. A medical robot works with both information and physical material. While informational norms allow for judgements about contextual integrity and the transmission principle governs the constraints applied on information transfer, nothing is said about material property. Certainly, contextual privacy provides an anchor for useful notions of privacy in this scenario and thus should be considered to be extended to cover both information and material flows.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
02/25/2019

An Access Control Model for Robot Calibration

High assurance surgical robotic systems require robustness to both safet...
research
03/23/2023

Contextual Integrity of A Virtual (Reality) Classroom

The multicontextual nature of immersive VR makes it difficult to ensure ...
research
09/06/2018

Analyzing Privacy Policies Using Contextual Integrity Annotations

In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using the theory of c...
research
11/07/2017

The VACCINE Framework for Building DLP Systems

Conventional Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) systems suffer from the follo...
research
10/07/2020

Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks to Reduce the Effects of Latency in Robotic Telesurgery

The introduction of surgical robots brought about advancements in surgic...
research
11/12/2019

Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot

Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgment...
research
07/27/2020

Dissecting liabilities in adversarial surgical robot failures: A national (Danish) and European law perspective

Being connected to a network exposes surgical robots to cyberattacks, wh...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset