5 Privacy and consent

 

A global virus pandemic is starting to abate, and different organizations are scrambling to put together ‘back-to-work’ plans to allow employees to return to their workplace after several months in lockdown at home. Toward this end, organizations are evaluating a (fictional) machine learning-based mobile app named TraceBridge. It supports the return to the office by collecting and modeling location traces, health-related measurements, other social data (e.g. internal social media and calendar invitations among employees), and administrative data (e.g. space planning information and org charts), to facilitate digital contact tracing: the process of figuring out disease-spreading interactions between an infected person and others. Is TraceBridge the right solution? Will organizations be able to re-open safely or will the employees be homebound for even more seemingly unending months?

5.1       Consent, power, and privacy

5.2       Achieving privacy through anonymization

5.2.1   Data publishing and syntactic anonymity

5.2.2   Data mining and differential privacy

5.2.3   Conclusion

5.3       Other ways of achieving privacy

5.4       Summary