Privacy is Not Dead, it’s Just Sleeping — Let’s Wake it Up!

Professor Latanya Sweeney 
Associate Professor of Computer Science,Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

Thursday, October 16, 2008

4:00 p.m.
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
Ice cream at 3:30 p.m. – Maxwell Dworkin ground floor

Given widespread data collection and data sharing,this talk identifies
ways technology and policy can work together to provide guarantees of
privacy while keeping data useful. This talk begins by looking at ways
to learn sensitive information about individuals from seemingly innocent
facts. Examples include real-world experiments on medical, genetic,
video, web, and social network data. We then look at ways to share
these data with guarantees of privacy and utility. This talk ends by
proposing new policy guidelines for data collection and sharing, on the
one hand, and new problems for computer scientists to solve, on the
other. Together, the proposed policy and technology weave together so
that society can enjoy the benefits of data sharing while still
protecting individual privacy.

Speaker: Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Computer
Science,Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University. She also founded and serves as the Director
of the Data Privacy Lab, which works with real-world stakeholders to
solve today’s privacy technology problems. Her work involves creating
technologies and related policies with provable guarantees of privacy
protection while allowing society to collect and share person-specific
information for many worthy purposes. Her work has received awards from
numerous organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association,
the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Blue Cross Blue
Shield Association. The American College of Medical Informatics
inducted her as a Fellow in 2006. Dr. Sweeney received her Ph.D. in
computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.