CCC Executive Council member Daniel Lopresti from Lehigh University and CCC Council member Sampath Kannan from the University of Pennsylvania provided contributions to this post. There is a conundrum between statistical access to data and privacy. The computing community has been working on this problem for years and came up with differential privacy as a solution, which is being implemented in the 2020 census, as described in this Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper on Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies, and this recent NY Times article.  The CCC is now working on similar issues in fairness with a workshop on Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning. See the […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched the Unlinkable Data Challenge with a $50k grand prize! The challenge aims to advance approaches to differential privacy, a term introduced by Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith in 2006, which refers to the privacy loss that occurs when an individual’s information is used in the manufacture of a large dataset. NIST is calling for concept papers that propose “a mechanism to enable the protection of personally identifiable information while maintaining a dataset’s utility for analysis.” How to Participate: The Unlinkable Data Challenge is a multi-stage Challenge.  This first stage of the Challenge is intended to source detailed concepts for new […]

The following is a guest blog post from CCC Council Member and Cybersecurity Task Force Member Nadya Bliss from Arizona State University. “Massive breach of databases containing personal information. Millions of records exposed.” This seems to be an almost daily headline these days. One of the most serious events in recent memory is the breach of the Equifax databases, potentially compromising 143 million records with personal information such as name, social security number, and credit history. While the Equifax breach garnered much attention, it is just the latest in a string of serious breaches. These events have highlighted the need for a forward-looking research agenda in support of regulatory frameworks and discourse […]

Did you know that driverless cars communicate real-time location and other data to cloud aggregators like Google? This intelligent infrastructure monitoring compromises the privacy of drivers who continuously share their locations. Without a framework for protecting the privacy of the driver’s data, drivers will be very conservative about sharing their data. This data, however, is a necessity for adding the intelligence to intelligent infrastructure. Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) released white papers describing a collective research agenda for intelligent infrastructure. Today, we highlight a new paper that was just released called the Privacy in Information-Rich Intelligent Infrastructure paper. We will be blogging about […]

The National Privacy Research Strategy by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD) has been released!  The National Privacy Research Strategy calls for research in science and engineering that will enable the U.S. to benefit from innovative data use while protecting privacy. Research agencies from across the government participated in the development of the strategy, reviewing existing Federal research activities in privacy-enhancing technologies, soliciting inputs from the private sector, and identifying priorities for privacy research funded by the Federal Government. In May 2015, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the privacy research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic […]

The next WATCH talk, called Privacy: Plural, Contextual, Contestable but not Unworkable is Thursday, March 17, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter is Deirdre K. Mulligan an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Policy lead for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center. She is also one of the lead organizers for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Privacy by Design workshop series. Prior to joining the School of Information in 2008, Mulligan was a Clinical Professor of Law, founding […]