A Little Privacy, Please Scientific American (07/07) Vol. 297, No. 1, P. 92; Walter, Chip
as it appeared in the August 8, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Director of Carnegie Mellon University's Laboratory for International Data Privacy Latanya Sweeney is dedicated to upholding people's privacy in an increasingly security-conscious world through the development of software. Her lab has devised "anonymizing" programs that can replace a person's face in a surveillance camera image with a new, impossible-to-identify facial image crafted from other faces in a database. Another brainchild of Sweeney's is the Identity Angel program, which combs the Internet and compiles thousands of identities by connecting names in one database with addresses, ages, and Social Security numbers distributed throughout others--enough information to commit identity theft--so that vulnerable people can be alerted to the problem and take corrective action before they can be exploited by malevolent parties. As a fellow of MIT's National Library of Medicine, Sweeney wrote the Scrub System program to improve the protection of several Boston hospitals' medical records; the program mined patient records, treatment notes, and letters between physicians to extract and delete a greater range of personal patient identifiers than standard search-and-replace software could. According to Sweeney, the ultimate solution is the upfront incorporation of privacy protection into the design and usability of new technologies by engineers and computer scientists. "Society can [then] decide how to turn those controls on and off," she reasons. Click Here to View Full Article
