NIST updates differential privacy guidelines to enable more data analytics !
Guidelines for using differential privacy from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology have been updated to make the privacy protection technology easier to apply. This in turn will enable data analytics to be applied to more databases containing confidential information. The technology itself is relatively mature, NIST says, but lacks standards that can make is easy to adopt and use. Hence the update to NIST’s Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees (NIST Special Publication 800-226). Differential privacy (DP) is a method of obscuring the identity of individuals in datasets while retaining the utility of the database as a source of statistical information, through the addition of random “noise.” The noise has the effect of de-identifying individuals in the dataset. The technology is well-established as a privacy protection tool, and can be applied to biometrics . A video shared by NIST gives the example of an emergency call in which a medical...