Thursday, January 3, 2013

Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data

Klarreich, Erica. "Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data." Scientific American, December 31, 2012. 

From the article: "A mathematical technique called “differential privacy” gives researchers access to vast repositories of personal data while meeting a high standard for privacy protection… A differentially private data release algorithm allows researchers to ask practically any question about a database of sensitive information and provides answers that have been “blurred” so that they reveal virtually nothing about any individual’s data — not even whether the individual was in the database in the first place." Read more