About Privacert Technologies

Privacert technologies were invented and developed by Dr. Latanya Sweeney, who has pioneered the field of data privacy and is recognized as a world leader in data privacy. Dr. Sweeney is a professor of computer science and policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the director of the Data Privacy Lab and director of the Privacy Technology Center, both in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her educational background is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Dr. Sweeney has developed numerous technologies, and has associated publications and patents. (For more information about Dr. Sweeney, click here.) Dr. Sweeney has granted Privacert, Inc. exclusive licenses to her Risk Assessment Server and Privacert Appliance, described below. Our products are based in part on these technologies.

Risk Assessment Server

The Risk Assessment Server identifies which fields and/or records in a dataset or data stream are vulnerable to known re-identification inference strategies, and reports the results as graphical and quantitative measures denoting the risks of re-identification. The Risk Assessment Server is the technical engine for our generation of Risk Assessments.

The Risk Assessment Server, provided exclusively through Privacert, should not be confused with the Identifiability Server, which was an earlier technology developed by Dr. Sweeney. The Identifiability Server performs naive measures of identifiability only. The Risk Assessment Server, in contrast, includes sophisticated measures of identifiability that are more accurate and robust than the Identifiability Server. Additionally, the Risk Assessment Server incorporates an inference engine to automatically identify attack strategies that may leave data vulnerable.

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Privacert Appliance

The Privacert Appliance is a stand-alone machine that is preset to de-identify a given dataset or datastream for a particular purpose. The resulting dataset is de-identified with scientific assurances of anonymity.

The Privacert Appliance, provided exclusively through Privacert, should not be confused with Scrub, Datafly, or k-Similar, which are technologies also developed by Dr. Sweeney. The Scrub System de-identifies textual documents, such as email messages, notes and letters. The Privacert Appliance, in comparison, works on field-structured data only.

Datafly and k-Similar also work on field-structured data, but they are general solutions and are best used by locations having to de-identify many diverse kinds of datasets. The Privacert Appliance, in comparison, is "prewired" for a particular dataset and purpose. As a result, the Privacert Appliance allows more detailed information to remain in the shared data than is typically possible with Datafly or k-Similar, and computation with the Privacert Appliance is incredibly fast, even on extremely large datasets. These feats are possible because the Privacert Appliance does not adhere to the formal protection model known as k-anonymity, inherent to Datafly and k-Similar. Instead, the Privacert Appliance makes its scientific assurances based on a concept known as the conservation of anonymity, which often (especially in the case of HIPAA compliance) allows more details to remain in the dataset than is possible with solutions based on k-anonymity. Another important difference concerns the volume of data that can be processed. Many k-anonymity solutions require a static copy of the entire dataset to be processed at one time, but the Privacert Appliance works on one record at a time, and does not require the entire dataset be presented. The result is that the Privacert Appliance is very fast and robust.

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