Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Privacy and anonymity in information society

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the First International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS 2008), collocated with 11th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2008). While the ever increasing computational power together with the huge amount of individual data collected daily by various agencies is of great value for our society, they also pose a significant threat to individuals' privacy. As a result legislators for many countries try to regulate the use and the disclosure of confidential information. Data privacy and anonymity have become a mainstream avenue for research. While privacy is a topic discussed everywhere, data anonymity recently established itself as an emerging area of computer science. Its goal is to produce useful computational solutions for releasing data, while providing scientific guarantees that the identities and other sensitive information of the individuals who are the subjects of the data are protected. The PAIS 2008 workshop is the first in its series and its mission is to provide an open yet focused platform for researchers and practitioners from computer science and other fields that are interacting with computer science in the privacy area such as statistics, healthcare informatics, and law to discuss and present current research challenges and advances in data privacy and anonymity research. The workshop program features 8 papers that cover a variety of topics, including distributed privacy protection, query auditing, k-anonymization and its applications, and micro-aggregation based data anonymization. In addition, the program includes an invited speech by Dr. Josep Domingo-Ferrer, the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy at Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, Catalonia. The title of his talk is: "Location Privacy via Unlinkability: An Alternative to Cloaking and Perturbation". We hope that you find this program interesting and thought-provoking.