Latanya Sweeney, Luis von Ahn, and Manuel Blum

Collecting sensitive data from disparate data sources is at the center of bio-terrorism and counter-terrorism surveillance efforts in the United States. It is believed that public safety will be better achieved by being able to detect strategic information in data people leave behind in their daily lives. Such detection requires the use of unprecedented amounts of personal data from many diverse sources, such as grocery stores, schools, hospitals, animal clinics, and more. The issues concerning individual privacy and organizational confidentiality are paramount. However, it may be possible to build on existing work in encryption, multi-party computation and cryptography in general, to provide real-time solutions that enable data sharing with scientific guarantees of anonymity and confidentiality within the data values themselves.

Visit the Data Privacy Laboratory website
The Privacy in DATA workshop, CMU, January 8-10, 2003