How Can We Enable Privacy in an Age of Big Data Analytics?

Even though some seem to think privacy is dead, we are all still wearing clothes, as Bruce Schneier observed at a recent conference on surveillance[1]. Yet big data and big data analytics are leaving some of us feeling a bit more naked than before. This talk will provide some personal observations on privacy today and then outline some research areas where progress is needed to enable society to gain the benefits of analyzing large datasets without giving up more privacy than necessary. Not since the early 1970s, when computing pioneer Willis Ware chaired the committee that produced the initial Fair Information Practice Principles [2] has privacy been so much in the U.S. public eye. Snowden's revelations, as well as a growing awareness that merely living our lives seems to generate an expanding "digital exhaust." Have triggered many workshops and meetings. A national strategy for privacy research is in preparation by a Federal interagency group. The ability to analyze large datasets rapidly and to extract commercially useful insights from them is spawning new industries. Must this industrial growth come at the cost of substantial privacy intrusions?