Should we rethink access to public data in the age of all-powerful algorithms? Yanis Fadili’s work, which won the prestigious Outstanding Paper Award at the IEEE Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Innovation conference in Kuala Lumpur, raises a burning question: could open data, a pillar of transparency, become a gateway to our privacy?
- Open data is a major step forward for transparency and innovation, but today, the power of artificial intelligence algorithms is creating new threats by allowing information about individuals to be revealed from our “passive digital identities.”
- Using simple temperature readings, Yanis Fadili demonstrated how artificial intelligence can reconstruct entire aspects of our lives—presence at home, consumption habits, lifestyles. This reasoning applies to many other types of data, from energy consumption to urban sensors. These “passive digital identities,” when exploited for malicious purposes, turn open data into a double-edged sword.
- Towards regulation focused on the power of algorithms? His research, conducted at the Responsible Digital Identity Chair at Télécom Paris, under the supervision of Valérie Fernandez and Thomas Houy, asks: should we sacrifice open data to protect our privacy? Or should we invent a new framework capable of reconciling transparency and protection in the face of increasingly intrusive algorithms?
Yanis Fadili received the Outstanding Paper Award in the category of research articles that contribute most to enlightening the professional world at the IEEE Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Innovation conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on August 26, 2025.
His work is part of the Responsible Digital Identity Chair, led by Valérie Fernandez, who is co-supervising his thesis with Thomas Houy.