Harvard University Privacy Tools Project

Harvard University Privacy Tools Project, 2014-2019

The Sloan Foundation awarded $868,954 to MIT Libraries and Harvard University to advance a multidisciplinary understanding of data privacy issues and build computational, statistical, legal, and policy tools to help address these issues in a variety of contexts. This project is defining and measuring privacy in both mathematical and legal terms, and explore alternate definitions of privacy that may be more general or more practical.

The project will study variants of differential privacy and develop new theoretical results for use in contexts where it is currently inappropriate or impractical. The research will provide a better understanding of the practical performance and usability of a variety of algorithms for analyzing and sharing privacy-sensitive data. The project will develop secure implementations of these algorithms and legal instruments, which will be made publicly available and used to enable wider access to privacy-sensitive data sets at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s Dataverse Network.

More about the Harvard University Privacy Tools Project.

This project was originally under the auspices of the Program on Information Science at MIT Libraries and finished as part of CREOS.