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Viewpoint: Implementing privacy-enhancing technologies in the time of a pandemic
Journal of Data Protection & Privacy,
3
(3),
344-352
(2020)
Abstract
This paper provides a personal perspective on the implementation of privacyenhancing technologies (PETs) based on almost two decades of work in the field. As we are currently in the midst of a global pandemic, this fact will modify our views on PETs and shed light on some key factors shaping the use of privacy technology. Ongoing and expected challenges that may inhibit the wide deployment of PETs at this critical time will also be highlighted. The pandemic has illuminated many of the reasons as to why access to health data is crucial from a public health perspective. Access needs to be, however, provided in a responsible way, even during a crisis, making PETs all the more important as a means by which to facilitate data access while helping to manage the associated privacy risks.
Keywords: privacy; data sharing; privacy-enhancing technologies; pandemic; risk management
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Khaled Emam is a senior scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and Director of the multidisciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting research on privacy-enhancing technologies to enable the sharing of health data for secondary purposes, including de-identification methods and synthetic data generation. He is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. He is also a cofounder and Director at Replica Analytics, a company that develops data synthesis technology. As an entrepreneur, Khaled founded or cofounded six companies involved with data management and data analytics. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement. Previously, Khaled was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He also served as the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He held the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2015. He has a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King’s College London, UK.
