Differential Privacy: A Q&A With NIST's Mary Theofanos

image showing personally identifiable information of a woman entered into a 911 database being scrubbed

Emergency response generates a lot of data, including people's names, addresses, phone numbers, ages and sex, which is necessary for assessing and addressing the situation. Some of that data may also be useful for treating future emergencies, but right now there's no secure way to disentangle personally identifiable information from individuals from the data that could serve emergency response generally. Enter differential privacy. For today's Taking Measure, we sat down with NIST computer scientist Mary Theofanos to discuss differential privacy and how it could be used to expose valuable information without exposing our personal details.