Data Privacy Lab
Motivation
Data-intensive technologies have transformed low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). An array of governments, private companies, non-profits, and humanitarian organizations increasingly rely on access to vast troves of personal data to carry out their missions efficiently and effectively. However, the collection, analysis, and use of these data, particularly from economically disadvantaged populations, generates serious privacy vulnerabilities that put individuals at risk. Regulations to curb these data privacy risks are growing in frequency and scope, but they often effectively curtail the flow of information which might otherwise be used to improve social welfare in LMICs.
Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) offer a potential solution. These methods can mitigate privacy vulnerabilities without sacrificing access to valuable data, and may even enable the collection and sharing of new types of data.
The possibilities to improve social welfare and foster innovation abound. For example, access to financial data, protected by PETs, could enable social protection agencies to more accurately and proactively target economic assistance to those in need, providing greater stability and resilience for underserved populations.
Research on PETs has advanced significantly in the past two decades, particularly in the US and Europe. However, engineering capacity to implement these solutions has not kept up, especially in LMICs, where less is known about their applicability and compatibility with privacy norms. This shortage of technical capacity has posed a significant obstacle to the uptake of PETs in LMIC contexts.
Introducing the Data Privacy Lab
To meet this need, CEGA is launching the Data Privacy Lab, led by Dr. Nitin Kohli, staff scientist at CEGA and a privacy expert. The Lab will work with governments, NGOs, and other organizations to implement privacy enhancing solutions today, while training the next generation of privacy and cryptography engineers for tomorrow. The Lab will accelerate the integration of data privacy within welfare-enhancing applications in three key ways:
- Facilitate research on privacy concerns and the integration of privacy preserving approaches within welfare-enhancing applications in LMICs.
- Make privacy “workable” by providing frameworks, tools, and technical expertise for organizations to understand privacy in their context and leverage PETs in practice.
- Build a pipeline of future privacy engineers, within the US and LMICs, to collaborate with and empower LMIC policy makers to make informed decisions about the tradeoffs between privacy, social impact, and other competing interests.
The Lab will recruit Masters and early PhD students to support its work, and collaborate with partners in LMICs to develop, deploy, and test PETs in real-world settings. CEGA believes a lab that centralizes research and engineering capacity is the best way to address the mismatch between academic publication incentives and the engineering challenges that often inhibit the successful application of PETs. This structure will allow the Lab to be more flexible, and to choose projects based on their potential to promote privacy and social welfare rather than projects that are likely to yield the most “publishable” results.
Privacy can be more than a compliance challenge to be solved. With the right tools, it can be the gateway to responsible and collaborative data sharing that unlocks innovation and improves social welfare. The Data Privacy Lab will work towards this future.
Media Coverage
>> Brookings “Using differential privacy to harness big data and preserve privacy”
>> The Markup “When Is Anonymous Not Really Anonymous?”
>> Amicus Brief in Support of US Census use of Differential Privacy
>> Tech HQ “Crunching numbers securely: the role of fully homomorphic encryption in credit scoring”
