Why Companies Should Perfect The Art of Lying — In Order to Preserve Your Privacy

The Catch-22 of data

Catch-22 … companies want to increasingly mine your data … but companies face massive fines for breaches of personal data. Step forward … the art of lying … that age old method of protecting our information. But this time it’s the mathematical art of lying.

With increasing fines coming along for data breaches and the release of PII (Personal Identifiable Information), companies will have to get a whole lot smarter in the way that they gather data from users. One way is to use differential privacy, and where we can get a user/device/service to actually lie.

If you are interested, we have just published a paper on who we can use the RAPPOR method to preserve privacy [here]:

The problem with k-anonymity

Increasingly within Big Data we gather data which can contain sensitive data. For example if we have a group of students who have taken a test, and we might want allow someone to determine the average grade for a cohort of students. But can we allow someone to determine this, but not…