Randomisation - IBM's answer to Web privacy

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Jun 4 00:47:53 EDT 2002


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/25551.html

Randomisation - IBM's answer to Web privacy
By ComputerWire
Posted: 03/06/2002 at 08:27 GMT

IBM Corp's new Privacy Institute has decided that randomization may be the
key to protecting consumer privacy on the web while also providing
e-businesses with informative metrics on their customers.

Thursday last week, the company said it has developed software that ensures
consumers' sensitive data never leaves their computers in an accurate form,
but can be reassembled at the back end in aggregate. IBM is looking for
partners to develop the software.

"What we wanted to do is to protect users' privacy... but we also wanted
businesses to get good information," said Rakesh Agrawal, who headed up the
project. "The dilemma was how to balance those two objectives, how do you
have your cake and eat it?"

The answer Agrawal, along with Ramakrishnan Srikant, came up with is an
algorithm for reconstructing previously randomized data sets in such a way
that the margin of error is only between 5% and 10% with a randomization of
100%, IBM claims.

In an example, a consumer registering for a web site truthfully enters
their age as 30. Software in the page, perhaps a Java applet, is set to
randomly add or subject years in a range of, say, five years, before
submitting the data to the site, so submits the user's age as 26.

This happens with all the other users of the site, until the company has a
data set of a few thousand individuals (that's all that's needed to get an
accurate picture, Agrawal says) but with wildly skewed data that does not
represent the true demographics of the users.

That's when IBM's special sauce kicks in. Before allowing the data to be
input to a data mining application, IBM's software "corrects" the
randomized data to provide a "close approximation of the true
distribution". How, exactly, IBM was not ready to disclose, but it involves
knowing what the range of randomization was in the first place.

"The intention now is to look for people that want to go into partnership
with a beta," said IBM spokesperson Kendra Collins. The software has
obvious commercial potential, but whether it will solve the problem of
people entering false information is another question

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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