📢 Are you a researcher working on understanding and mitigating the harms of AI-generated non-consensual images of adults and children? Then our CARA '26 workshop (co-located with @soupsconference.bsky.social) taking place on Aug 24th in Hannover, Germany is for you!

It was an honor to present our paper "Evaluating Concept Filtering Defenses against Child Sexual Abuse Material Generation by Text-to-Image Models" at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, California 😊 📜 @sp.ieee-security.org

Research by Maxime Deryck (UGent), Diane Leblanc-Albarel and Bart Preneel (COSIC, KU Leuven) is featured in CyberInsidercom: "Microsoft #PhotoDNA is vulnerable to false positives and data leakage". cyberinsider.com/microsoft-ph...

I'm excited to announce that my research group at CISPA @cispa.de is recruiting PhD students to work on privacy, security, and user safety in general-purpose data systems, with a focus on generative AI systems, synthetic data, and anonymization. Are you interested in:

Call for Papers: MetaCRiSP Workshop (Security & Privacy). A venue for metascience and critical reflection on research and peer-review practices in security & privacy. Workshop: May 21, 2026 · San Francisco. (47th IEEE S&P) Deadline: Feb 12, 2026. More here: metacrisp.org @mu00d8.bsky.social

💥The year starts with great news:💥 🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉 He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss. It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟 Congrats, we're proud! arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180

I am delighted to announce I have joined @cispa.de as a tenure-track faculty earlier this month! I’m really excited to join such a stellar team of security and privacy researchers!

Our new paper demonstrates that removing images of children from training datasets of text-to-image models fails to prevent the misuse of these models to generate child sexual abuse material (AI CSAM). A thread 🧵

🎧 (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

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!

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/

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.

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,

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...

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!

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/

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

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.

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/...

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