Protecting Your Privacy In The Information Age

Nationally known computer science and public policy expert Latanya Sweeney is a frequent and popular speaker on the use -- and abuse -- of electronically collected personal data.

At 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, in Stoddard Hall Auditorium, Sweeney will present "Privacy: Going, Going ," a lecture sponsored by the Friends of the Smith College Libraries and the departments of computer science and government. Her talk is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.

A faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Sweeney has patented systems for scrubbing personal data from medical databases and for controlling the disclosure of data such that the identity of any individual cannot be recognized. She consults with legislators on privacy legislation and speaks regularly to such audiences as the U.S. Health Care Finance Administration, the National Library of Medicine and the National Center for Vital Health Statistics.

Educated in computer science, psychology and philosophy, Sweeney has pioneered a new area of computer science that she calls "computational disclosure control." The goal of her work in this area is to build and study computational techniques that produce data specific enough to be useful but anonymous enough to maintain confidentiality.
"Society is experiencing exponential growth in the number and variety of data collected on individuals," Sweeney explains.

"This data, when linked, provides an electronic shadow of a person or organization that is as identifying as a fingerprint -- even when the information contains no explicit identifiers, such as name and phone number.

"Having so much person-specific data collected and shared-- by the government as well as by other parties -- makes the future meaning of terms like liberty, freedom and privacy unclear," she adds.

In her talk at Smith, Sweeney will provide examples of publicly available data collections that provide sensitive information about people and will examine data collections that particularly impact women.

In addition to her teaching appointments, Sweeney is a fellow at the National Library of Medicine and a doctoral candidate in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a S.M. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an A.L.B. degree in computer science from Harvard University. Before that, Sweeney was the CEO and president of a computer company.

For more information, call the Friends of the Smith College Libraries at (413) 585-2903.

Contact: Marti Hobbes, mhobbes@smith.edu

October 13, 2000