Monday Faculty Research Seminar

Presenter:    Ram D. Gopal - GE Capital Endowed Professor of Business and Head of the Department of Operations and Information Management in the School of Business, University of Connecticut.

Title: Hiding in Plain Sight: Anonymity and Privacy Preserving Mechanisms for Data Collection and Analysis.

Abstract: The massive amount of sensitive survey data about individuals, that agencies collect and share through the Internet, is causing a great deal of privacy concerns. These concerns may discourage individuals from revealing their sensitive information. Existing data collection techniques have serious downsides in terms of both efficiency, and the levels of protection they offer against various realizations of threats. Moreover, they do not provide any flexibility to the users to be able to specify acceptable levels of privacy protection, before deciding whether to participate in the surveys. In this paper, we propose a two-pronged privacy protection model corresponding to these two privacy concerns. That is, a new efficient anonymity preserving data collection technique, and a method to incorporate heterogeneous privacy constraints. Together they help preserve the privacy of respondents both during and after data collection.