Privacy Encodings for Sensitive Data

PESD is a research project between the DataLab at the University of Washington, the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University, and the Socioenvironmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.

The goal of this project is to better support qualitative and mixed methods researchers managing, sharing, and reusing privacy sensitive data. PESD’s work is in response to a recognized sociotechnical gap between the desire of researchers to share and learn from one another’s data on the one hand, and the tools available to reliably facilitate the exchange and reuse of privacy sensitive data on the other.

Through a set of case studies, interviews, and conceptual modeling exercises our team will build a set of privacy encodings that can travel with data as they are shared between people and machines. By better facilitating the reliable exchange of these data we can work towards a network of data producers and consumers that trust repository software to facilitate these types of interactions.

PESD builds upon a rich tradition of privacy by design research, and in particular the Contextual Integrity principles of restricting the flow of information based on a set of generalizable transmission principles. We’re actively working to contribute to this rich body of literature with our empirical cases and theoretical extensions of Contextual Integrity.

If you are interested in getting involved in our work please contact one of our team members, or send an email toboscoe@uw.edu & nmweber@uw.edu