In our blog we provide you with industry insights on privacy, anonymization, analytics and of course information about our solution Aircloak Insights.
August 25, 2020
I would like to congratulate Matthew Joseph, Zachary Schutzman, and Travis Dick, of the University of Pennsylvania, for their brilliant de-anonymization attack on Diffix Cedar as part of the MPI-SWS Diffix bounty program. For their effort, the UPenn team received $5150 out of a possible $10000 payout. The attack was demonstrated in May 2020 on the version Diffix Cedar. The … read more
August 24, 2020
From time to time a participant in a Diffix bounty program runs a successful attack and receives a payment. One might take this to mean that individuals in the databases of organizations that use Aircloak data anonymization were at serious risk. This is not necessarily the case, and so far has never been the case. The Diffix bounty program … read more
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
June 9, 2020
A critical challenge for governments in the coming months is to re-open the economy without overwhelming the health system. To do this, decision makers across the globe argue that they need access to geo-location and health symptoms data. This allows them to understand where crowding is taking place, how this crowding relates to Covid-19 symptoms, and how specific social distancing … 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
April 20, 2020
National Data Protection Authorities need to pave the way for private Covid-19 data sharing between companies and governments. This article proposes a rapid GDPR anonymization certification so that companies can quickly use existing commercial anonymization technologies for sharing Covid-19 data without legal risk. Data is a key tool in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Decision makers need data to understand the … read more