Ana-Maria Cretu
ana-mariacretu.bsky.social
Ana-Maria Cretu
@ana-mariacretu.bsky.social
Post-doc at EPFL studying privacy and safety harms in data-driven systems. PhD in data privacy from Imperial College London. https://ana-mariacretu.github.io/
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
🎧 (German) Podcast Tip: Scammed by an AI voice?
If Elon Musk suddenly calls, it's likely a deepfake. Cloning voices with AI takes just seconds — and scammers are all over it. CISPA researcher Lea Schönherr explains how.
c’t podcast “They Talk Tech”:
🎙 frauen-technik.podigee.io/30-new-episode
June 6, 2025 at 10:05 AM
In 2023 I successfully defended my PhD thesis at Imperial. Two years later, it's great to be back to Imperial College London & the Royal Albert Hall for the graduation ceremony. It brought up so many memories and was a blast!
June 4, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
We're organizing the interdisciplinary summer school on privacy again. It focuses on implications of privatizing digital services in the public sector, and it's aimed at PhD students from social sciences, law, and computer science. We emphasize group work, in parallel to lectures:
isp.cs.ru.nl/2025/
The 6th Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy (ISP 2025)
The official website of the ISP Summerschool. Find out more about dates, tutorials, talks, the programme, the venue, and travelling suggestions.
isp.cs.ru.nl
April 9, 2025 at 8:14 AM
I had the pleasure to give an interview about synthetic data www.wired.com/story/nvidia... by @laurengoode.bsky.social for Wired.

I'd like to add a caveat: the promises of synthetic data to solve privacy and data scarcity issues are not yet backed up by scientific evidence.
Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data
Nvidia has acquired synthetic data startup Gretel to bolster the AI training data used by the chip maker's customers and developers.
www.wired.com
March 28, 2025 at 9:24 AM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
Reading synthetic data papers in healthcare journals is often infuriating as a privacy (ex-)researcher, but I stumbled across one that is really egregious. The authors cite Stadler et al. (the initial work on membership inference attacks on SDG), to (wrongly!) dismiss a SOTA notion of privacy,
March 26, 2025 at 3:41 PM
I totally agree: "as a society need to realize that a huge portion of what is being done with generative AI tools is for the type of thing I have described in this article, or for nonconsensual, AI-generated intimate imagery." Must read article: www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.
www.404media.co
March 19, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
It's my great pleasure to announce that the sixth Interdisciplinary Summerschool on Privacy (ISP 2025) will take place July 6 - 11, 2025, at hotel Erica, Berg en Dal, the Netherlands. This year's topic: Digitalization of the Public Sector: Risks, Rights, and Resistance. Registration is now open!
March 6, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
I was in Paris last week for the #AIActionSummit & was honoured to participate in the “AI in public interest” panel.

👇🏾 my thoughts & reflections on what AI in public interest is/isn’t & some concrete steps/initiatives for `bending the arc of AI towards the public interest' aial.ie/pages/aiparis/
Bending the arc of AI towards the public interest
By Abeba Birhane, 18/02/2025 Following the first in Bletchley Park in 2023 and the second in Seoul in 2024, the third AI Action Summit took place in February 2025 in Paris. In the context of previous ...
aial.ie
February 18, 2025 at 1:17 PM
Looking forward to presenting my research on automated privacy evaluations of anonymisation techniques in the Cyber- & AI-Security track organised by Swisscom at @appliedmldays.bsky.social
February 10, 2025 at 9:34 PM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
This paper ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc..., published at ICAIC25, blatantly plagiarises a paper by myself and colleagues at the Turing,, claiming that they developed the sqlsynthgen package. Although the text has been rephrased, the contents are nearly identical.
February 3, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by Ana-Maria Cretu
Fantastic, very practical review, on the challenges in data and model anonymization.

Also highlights the enormous gap between what is theoretically possible and what used in practice (eg. N>5 rule)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Anonymization: The imperfect science of using data while preserving privacy
Safe anonymization and sharing of personal data will be achieved by combining formal privacy methods with red-teaming.
www.science.org
December 28, 2024 at 3:01 PM
For my first post on Bluesky, here is a recommended read for anyone interested in the science of re-identification. This is a paper that's elegant, deep, and solves a real problem. I still remember how my mind was blown away when I read it. Congratulations @rocher.lc @yvesalexandre.bsky.social
🔴 Finally out, my work in @naturecomms.bsky.social investigates (re-)identification techniques from browser fingerprinting to facial recognition.

It's a surprisingly tough problem, with incorrect heuristics and rules of thumbs often used—huge issue for accountability and independent investigations.
January 9, 2025 at 8:01 PM