Microsoft opens doors to Research Labs secrets

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 25 May 2008 14:05

Opinion and Analysis

Levin said that “This issue of privacy is one that’s gotten a lot of attention, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of what I would call solid technical work. We’re making some significant efforts to try to put a technical foundation under the notion of privacy. The problem in most systems that exist today is that the guarantees they offer for the privacy of individual data are too weak.”

Microsoft’s Labs document says that this is “alarming for data providers, such as those who host medical data. They are bound by law to ensure that customers can obtain only the information they’re supposed to get.”

Levin explained: “The idea here, in the work that we’re doing is to start over with a rigorous definition, rigorous in the mathematical sense, from first principles that are general enough to encompass not just what we see in the privacy world today, but what we can plausibly anticipate will happen in the future.”

“Imagine that a query is thrown at the database and some result comes back. If the particular result that comes back is equally likely whether your data has been added to the database or not, then, in a sense, that result doesn’t really reveal anything about you. If the database could make that assurance to you, we think that would go a long way toward satisfying the desire for privacy.”

“We think this is a first step in what will become a very important area for the modern world.”

There’s plenty more you can read at Microsoft’s Research Labs website direct, which is definitely worth visiting if you want a further glimpse into the future as Microsoft’s researchers have seen it!