DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY

One important area where privacy-preserving technology is particularly important medical research. The movement towards electronic medical records brings the opportunity for creating vast repositories of patient data that can be mined to dramatically accelerate the rate of progress in medical research. However, privacy concerns make it is infeasible to provide researchers with unfettered access to medical records. Differential privacy promises a practical resolution to this conflict. To preserve differential privacy, the contributions of any one individual to the answer of any question must be negligible, in a precise mathematical sense. It is intuitive that this preserves people's privacy, since the query results given to researchers are essentially the same, whether or not a particular person's data is included in the database. Differential privacy, then, creates the tantalizing possibility of privacy-preserving data analysis that is both useful and provably secure. Our goal in this..