Bridging Privacy Definitions

This working group - composed of privacy experts across disciplines - explores the range of privacy-related definitions from law, computer science, and social science, covering topics such as measures of informational harm, de-identification techniques, formal privacy models such as differential privacy, and privacy standards from laws such as FERPA and HIPAA. The group explores the nature of these definitions, the relationships and gaps between them, and potential methods of bridging the disciplinary divide.

A recent product from this working group is a methodology for extracting a mathematical model from a legal standard such as FERPA. This product can be used to demonstrate that a privacy technology satisfies any given legal standard.

For the 2016-2017 year, we plan to focus on questions related to the broad conceptualization of informational harms, including group harms like discrimination and their relationship to the types of harms addressed by formal privacy definitions like differential privacy. We are also looking to develop methods for setting formal privacy parameters (like the differential privacy parameter epsilon) based on accepted legal, ethical, and social notions.

We are excited to hear from anyone seeking to explore multidisciplinary approaches to privacy. For more information and to join our mailing list, please contact Lindsay Froess at lfroess@seas.harvard.edu