Materials

Use the raw slides (pdf) before lecture to take notes.

Summary

• Collecting data and analyzing it is very important for science and societal good,
• Ad-hoc methods for anonymizing data are likely to fail
  • Erasing Name: but leaving DoB, Zip, Sex allows Linkage attacks
  • Removing PII: but keeping queries (AOL example)
  • Replacing id with random #s: Complex linking with auxiliary data sources (Netflix)
• K-anonymity
  • This notion is syntactic, it can fail as well
• Follow-ups, L-diversity, etc.
• Differential Privacy (DP): a formal mathematical framework that guards against these types of attacks
  • It is not a silver bullet and needs to be used carefully
  • Google, Apple both use sophisticated DP