Simson Garfinkel: The Case for Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs)
Date/Time
Date(s) - 28/01/2025
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location
The Murrow Room
Categories
Please join the Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs for a conversation with Simson Garfinkel, Chief Scientist of BasisTech, LLC. He will discuss “How Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) let governments and businesses share sensitive data while protecting privacy.” Professor Josephine Wolff will moderate the conversation.
Tax returns and financial filings, health records, education records, and crime data are just some of the many detailed and highly sensitive data that governments have collected about their citizens. Businesses have also moved into the space by collecting huge archives of sensitive data, including consumer purchases, cellphone mobility traces, and video surveillance. Today, only a tiny fraction of this consumer data is released as “open data” or sold as “de-identified data.” The rest are locked up, unable to benefit society or promote new economic activity. Worse, much of that allegedly de-identified data can actually be re-identified, as happened when journalists at The Pillar used de-identified data to identify Catholic priests who were going to gay bars and using hookup apps.
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) use advanced mathematics and computational techniques to let organizations analyze and publish sensitive data while protecting the privacy of individuals and sensitive data from organizations. Although these techniques have existed for decades, they are increasingly being deployed by governments and businesses. However, PETs are not without controversy. When the U.S. Census Bureau adopted a PET called “differential privacy” for the 2020 Census, more than 4000 academics signed an open letter voicing their opposition. These academics were concerned about how differential privacy would do such a good job protecting privacy that the resulting data would be useless for academic research. This talk presents the case for PETs, explains popular PETs for a non-technical audience, and discusses the specific controversy of deploying differential privacy for the 2020 U.S. Census.
The event is open to members of the Fletcher and Tufts communities and invited guests. Please register via the following Microsoft Form to attend the event in person or let us know if you would like to attend virtually. If you would like to submit discussion questions for the speaker in advance, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Lunch will be served at the beginning of the event. Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Simson Garfinkel is the Chief Scientist of BasisTech, LLC, a technology accelerator in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, where he co-teaches “AC221: Critical Thinking in Data Science,” an advanced course about data science ethics. He previously held senior technical positions as Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access at the U.S. Census Bureau and as Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. His eighteenth book, Differential Privacy, will be published in March 2025 by MIT Press. His last book, Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Both books are open access. He holds seven U.S. patents and has published more than 70 research articles in computer security and digital forensics. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the National Association of Science Writers. Garfinkel is the co-author of Law and Science for the Quantum Age, which explores the technology, history, policy, and business implications of quantum information science. As a journalist, he has written about science, technology, and technology policy in the popular press since 1983, and has won several national journalism awards. Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.