Revealing their location online puts their existence at risk, a group warns

by Becky Yoose Library Applications and Systems Manager The Seattle Public Library Libraries and library vendors contain multitudes of data1 : item circulation, patron information, computer sessions, program attendance, website logs, and searches, just to name a few. Data plays De-identification and Patron Data

I. Introduction Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Every interaction with technology creates data about that user. Each credit card purchase, medic…

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…

Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple …

In discussions about privacy and big data and the secondary uses of data, I have observed that a number of distinct concepts are oftentimes confused or treated

Privacy protections against government surveillance are often scoped to communications content and exclude communications metadata. In the United States, the National Security Agency operated a particularly controversial program, collecting bulk telephone metadata nationwide. We investigate the privacy properties of telephone metadata to assess the impact of policies that distinguish between content and metadata. We find that telephone metadata is densely interconnected, can trivially be reidentified, enables automated location and relationship inferences, and can be used to determine highly sensitive traits.

As healthcare organizations continue to collect more and more patient data across the spectrum of care, there is a rapidly growing need to access and use this t

Can big databases be kept both anonymous and useful?

If it isn’t a panacea, de-identification remains a critical part of every privacy pro’s toolbox. At a workshop earlier this month, the Future of Privacy Forum

Experts say Anthem customers should be wary of potential "piggyback" attacks.

Date/store/location/rough cost metadata from four credit-card purchases identifies 90% of credit-card holders in a deidentified dataset.

"You can have anonymous data or you can have open science, but you can't have both."

Cory Doctorow summarizes the problem with the idea that sensitive personal information can be removed responsibly from big data: computer scientists are pretty sure that’s impossible.

Botched attempt to scrub data reveals driver details for 173 million taxi trips.