A second-year Waterloo Engineering student shared the top prize at a recent hackathon focused on the creation of technology to protect privacy.
Lena Nguyen of systems design engineering teamed up with Anne Chung, a second-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo, to develop software that puts browsers on kids mode by disabling web page fields asking for sensitive information such as addresses and credit card numbers.
Anne Chung (second from left) and Lena Nguyen (middle) pose with a Major League Hacking representative (left) and event organizers Benn McGregor (second from right) and Marcel O'Neil after taking top place at the inaugural Citizen Hacks.
Their project, Safe.net, also features a portal app that allows parents to see websites that have been blocked and grant their children access to the ones they consider ok.
The first-ever Citizen Hacks event was organized by a group of second-year software engineering students at Waterloo and held earlier this month in Toronto.
It attracted almost 150 students from high schools, colleges and universities in the Greater Toronto Area. The keynote speaker was Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, who outlined the principles of privacy by design.
Privacy by design principles set the stage
Hackers working in teams, including more than 30 participants from Waterloo, then had 36 hours to build their projects using those principles as the starting point.
Third-year Waterloo software engineering student Phillip Scott also finished among the winners as a member of the second-place team.
Its project, Enclave, is a protocol built on top of the Keybase Filesystem for making personal data accessible to organizations while keeping the user in control.
Citizen Hacks was organized to bring students together to address the privacy implications of technology and is part of an emerging trend involving educational opportunities that encourage innovation in privacy-protecting technology.