Databases Must Balance Privacy With Utility

Article published in ScienceDaily: Databases must balance privacy with utility, says professor

Agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau produce a voluminous amount of data, much of which is of tremendous value to social scientists and other researchers. But the data also includes personal information that, under the law, must be protected and could be harmful were it to fall into the wrong hands.

Thus, organizations that maintain such databases need to devise ways to protect individuals' privacy while preserving the value of the information to researchers, writes Carnegie Mellon University Statistics Professor George Duncan in a commentary in the Aug. 31 edition of the journal Science.

Duncan said traditional methods of "de-identifying" records, such as stripping away Social Security numbers or birthdates, are inadequate to safeguard privacy because a person who knows enough about the data pool could use other characteristics to identify individuals. Duncan, for example, is the only person who holds a Ph.D. in statistics and teaches in Carnegie Mellon's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, so any data set that included that information, even with Duncan's name removed, could be used to determine his identity.

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