Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Fourth International Workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS 2011), collocated with EDBT/ICDT 2011 joint conference. Organizations collect vast amounts of information on individuals, and at the same time they have access to ever-increasing levels of computational power. Although this conjunction of information and power provides great benefits to society, it also threatens individual 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 workshop is the fourth 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 eight papers that cover a variety of topics, including transaction data anonymization; privacy preserving protocol for semantic similarity join; digital oblivion; distributing data for secure database services; privacy issues when sharing reputation; peer-to-peer user private information retrieval; and P3P semantics. In addition, the program includes one keynote talk by Dr. Yücel Saygin from Sabanci University, Turkey. We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking. We also hope that the workshop will provide you with valuable opportunities to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners and serve as a catalyst for further research and collaboration