Personal Data: Up Close and Impersonal Federal Computer Week (08/27/07) Joch, Alan
as it appeared in the September 10, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
Debate persists between the United States and the European Union regarding how much data to divulge when comparing terrorist watch lists and trans-Atlantic flight manifests. The underlying issue involves balancing the protection of privacy rights with the fight against terrorism, which requires the retrieval of key information. Some computer science experts say that an improved balance might be achieved through data anonymization, a method by which software combs through scrambled data and marks any suspicious patterns. At that point, a government could request a subpoena for records in compliance with the Fourth Amendment. IBM's Anonymous Resolution Technology is used by the United States, though not as widely as some experts had anticipated, considering the technology's promise. One key element of IBM's software is one-way encryption, a method for scrambling data without decrypting it, thereby guarding the information from human eyes. However, some security experts caution that anonymization is not a full solution, but rather a first step that must be complemented by a complete security system. As well, some anonymization methods keep encrypted indexes of sensitive data in a central repository, which is a vulnerability, according to computer science professor Latanya Sweeney, director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy at Carnegie Mellon University. Sweeney's lab has developed PrivaMix, anonymization algorithms and techniques that have been used for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as well as by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to protect identities. The software assigns numeric codes to client data and those codes are used when sharing data between networks and over secure Internet connections. Click Here to View Full Article
