Natasha Lomas reports: Privacy researchers in Europe believe they have the first proof that a long-theorised vulnerability in systems designed to protect privacy by aggregating and adding noise to data to mask individual identities is no longer just a theory. The research has implications for the immediate field of differential privacy and beyond — raising…
Category: Misc
How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants
Bruce Schneier writes: Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don’t have the same level of access to aid in their defense: The proposed privacy laws would make this situation worse. Lawmakers may…
Domestic Batterers Should Be Tracked on a Watch List
From an opinion piece by Misha Valencia: Every 16 hours, a woman in the United States is fatally shot by a current or former partner. Intimate partner homicide is one of the leading causes of death for women in the country, with nearly half of all murdered women killed by a partner. But there are…
Anonymized data isn’t nearly anonymous enough – here’s how we fix it
Donna Lu reports: To protect privacy, data collected about us is sometimes anonymised before being used, such as for scientific research or by advertising companies wanting to hone their algorithms. The process involves removing personally identifiable information – including direct identifiers like names or photographs, and combinations of indirect identifiers such as workplace, occupation, salary…