Report on international workshop on privacy and anonymity in the information society (PAIS 2008)

Abstract

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 individual privacy. As a result legislators for many countries try to regulate the use and the disclosure of confidential information. Various privacy regulations (such as USA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Canadian Standard Association Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information, Australian Privacy Amendment Act 2000, etc.) have been enacted in many countries all over the world. Data privacy and protecting individual 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 on Privacy and Anonymity in the Information Society (PAIS 2008) was held on March 29, 2008, co-located with the 11th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2008) in Nantes, France. It was the first in its series and the mission of the workshop is to provide an open