What have we been doing?

We've been silent for a while on the blog, but that's because we've been distracted by actual work building out the datatrust (both the technology and the organization).Here's a brief rundown of what we're doing.Grace is multi-tasking on 3 papers.Personal Data License We're conducting a thought experiment to think through what the world might look like if there was an easy way for individuals to release personal information on their own terms.Organizational Structures We’ve conducted a brief survey of a few organizational structures we think are interesting models for the datatrust "trusted" entities from Banks to Public Libraries and "member-based" organizations from Credit Unions to Wikipedia. We tried to answer the question: What institutional structures can be practical defenses against abuses of power as the datatrust becomes a significant repository of highly sensitive personal information?Snapshot of Publicly Available Data Sources A cursory overview of some of the more interesting data sets that are available to the public from government agencies to answer the question: How is the datatrust going to be different / better than the myriad data sources we already have access to today?We also now have 2 new contributors to CDP: Tony Gibbon and Grant Baillie.A couple of months ago, Alex wrote about a new anonymization technology coming out of Microsoft Research: PINQ. It's an elegant, simple solution, but perhaps not the most intuitive way for most people to think about guaranteeing privacy.Tony is working on a demonstration of PINQ in action so that you and I can see how our privacy is protected and therefore believe *that* it works. Along the way, we're figuring out what makes intuitive sense about the way PINQ works and what doesn't and what we'll need to extend so that researchers using the datatrust will be able to do their work in a way that makes sense.Grant is working on a prototype of the datatrust itself which involves working out such issues as:

• What data schemas will we support? We think this one to begin with: Star Schema.
• How broadly do we support query structures?
• Managing anonymizing noise levels.

To help us answer some of these questions, we've gathered a list of data sources we think we'd like to support in this first iteration. (e.g. IRS tax data, Census data) (More to come on that.)We will be blogging about all of these projects in the coming week, so stay tuned!