In our blog we provide you with industry insights on privacy, anonymization, analytics and of course information about our solution Aircloak Insights.
August 11, 2020
A frequent assumption among privacy professionals is that any data anonymization system that allows unlimited queries leads to serious privacy loss. This article debunks that assumption with a simple example derived from the seminal 2003 paper of Dinur and Nissim. We give examples of how Diffix achieves strong anonymity and good utility with unlimited queries (and no budget), and suggest … read more
June 24, 2020
Try googling for the phrase “anonymization is impossible”. You’ll get plenty of hits. The idea that anonymization is impossible, or at least very very hard, is widespread. Another widely held belief is that Differential Privacy, with its mathematical guarantee of privacy, is the only way to reliably anonymize data. In stark contrast to these beliefs is the simple fact … read more
May 27, 2020
Aircloak is pleased to announce the data anonymization bounty program for Diffix Dogwood, the anonymization technology at the core of Aircloak Insights. The MPI-SWS/Diffix Bounty 2020 program is sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Aircloak’s research partner. The total purse is $30,000, and top prize is $10,000. The bounty program uses the General Data Anonymization measurement … read more
November 26, 2019
Interestingly enough, despite being a heavily discussed topic, surveys on privacy and data anonymization are still pretty rare. In September of this year, we were invited to participate at an event from Digitalstrategie.NRW (an initiative on digitization, coined by the Ministry of Economic Affairs from North Rhine-Westphalia) with a talk on data anonymization. What made this event unique is that … read more
November 21, 2019
In the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (or PrivTech), one truth is becoming increasingly apparent: there is no silver bullet in privacy approaches. Each data use case has to be considered separately. Typical requirements we discuss with customers are What analytical quality is needed? Is time to market for each use case a factor? What privacy protection is needed or … read more
September 23, 2019
“’Anonymized’ Data Can Be Anything But’” – Forbes, July 24, 2019 When the world media reported the results of a recent scientific paper on the ineffectiveness of data anonymization, it was anything but news. Already in 1981 the US computer scientist, Dorothy E. Denning, stated in one of her scientific papers on database security that when working with data it … read more
July 29, 2019
While theoretical examples and academic approaches to data anonymization are plentiful, it is hard to find information on actual current use cases. To fill this gap, we are constantly collecting the best examples and present these here. At the end of this article we also name tools and vendors that claim to solve some of the respective use cases. Note … read more