How Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) let governments and business share sensitive data while protecting privacy
Simson Garfinkel
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Abstract:
Tax returns and financial filings, health records, education records, and crime data are just some of detailed and highly sensitive data that governments have about people.
Businesses also have huge archives of sensitive data, including consumer purchases, cellphone mobility traces, and video surveillance. Today a tiny fraction of these data are released as “open data” or sold as “de-identified data.” The rest are locked up, unable to benefit society or promote new economic activity. Worse, much of that allegedly de-identified data can actually be re-identified, as happened when journalists at The Pillar used de-identified data to identify Catholic priests who were going to gay bars and using hookup apps.
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) use advanced mathematics and computational techniques to let organizations analyze and publish sensitive data while protecting the privacy of individuals and sensitive data from organizations. These techniques have existed for decades and are increasingly being deployed by governments and businesses. PETs are not without controversy. When the US Census Bureau adopted a PET called “differential privacy” for the 2020 Census, more than 4000 academics signed an open letter voicing their opposition: they were concerned that differential privacy would do such a good job protecting privacy that the resulting data would be useless for academic research.
This talk presents the case for PETs, explains popular PETs for a non-technical audience, and discusses the specific controversy of deploying differential privacy for the 2020 US Census.
This is discussed in more detail in his latest book Differential Privacy .
Bio:
Simson Garfinkel is the Chief Scientist and Chief Operating Officer of BasisTech in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was previously a program scientist at AI2050, part of Schmidt Futures. He has held several roles across government, including a Senior Data Scientist at the Department of Homeland Security, the US Census Bureau's Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access and a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. From 2006 to 2015, he was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In addition to his research, Garfinkel is a journalist, an entrepreneur and an inventor; his work is generally concerned with computer security, privacy and information technology.
Simson is the author or co-author of 16 books, and the author of more than a thousand articles. He is a contributing writer for Technology Review and has written as a freelancer for many publications including Wired magazine, The Boston Globe, Privacy Journal, and CSO Magazine. His work for CSO Magazine earned him five regional and national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Awards in 2003 and 2004. He is also the editor of The Forensics Wiki.
Directions to 32-G449 - MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA: Please use the main entrance to the Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street (the entrance closest to Main street) as those doors will be unlocked. Upon entering, proceed to the elevators which will be on the right after passing a large set of stairs and a MITAC kiosk. Take the elevator to 4th floor and turn right, following the hall to an open area; 32-G449 will be on the left. Location of Stata on campus map
This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online).
