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A U n i q u e J o u r n a l
The JOPT has a unique goal: to cross-fertilize research across the various communities engaged in the construction of privacy technology. JOPT is being launched at a time when several technical communities are actively engaged in some form of privacy problems related to a specific application domain. There is a serious lack of communication between the communities and no community whose primary focus is to develop the foundations of the science of privacy. While a lot of good and useful research is underway, lessons learned in one community are often not shared with other communities, causing researchers to re-invent or ignore known results altogether. The JOPT addresses these needs, and by doing so, fosters the growth of privacy technology in all its constituent domain communities. The JOPT provides a mechanism for researchers to share results across communities by: (1) publishing generalizable findings in the JOPT; and, (2) applying generalized findings learned from the JOPT to constituent domains. We expect researchers to continue to publish domain-specific findings in community publications thereby applying generalized knowledge (from the JOPT) to specific application areas and completing the knowledge-sharing cycle.
Below is a survey of some overlapping scientific communities currently addressing privacy technology. These communities are considered application domains for findings reported in the JOPT:
- Bioinformatics (Genetic Information)
Related content: given repositories of DNA sequences and other forms of genomic data, methods to provide these repositories for pharmaco-genomic and population genetic studies while providing privacy protections, notwithstanding the uniqueness of the data relationship to subjects. - Biometrics
Related content: methods by which humans are identified in data and methods for detecting and preventing identity theft. - Computer security
Related content: privacy problems from the standpoint of secure communications. Techniques that insulate against eavesdropping, provide secure payments, etc. - Computer theory
Related content: encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computations, and the use of trusted third parties. - Database security
Related content: access controls and audit trails to identify intrusions and maintain accountability. - Medical informatics
Related content: privacy protection methods for sharing medical data, where data includes information provided in a wide variety of fomats (e.g., clinical notes, images, DNA sequences, lab results, prescriptions, web logs). - Policy specification and enforcement
Related content: methods to automatically express and enforce privacy policies and preferences. Two threads: digital rights management (DRM) and privacy policy specifications (e.g., P3P) fuel this emerging community, expanding attention into enterprise-wide solutions and notions of privacy rights management. - Privacy-preserving data mining
Related content: privacy protection (primarily by outlier detection and uses of suppression and additive noise) such that data mining algorithms continue to provide reasonable results from protected data. - Statistical disclosure control
Related content: methods to provide tabular and field-structured data such that unusual information is masked or removed while statistical properties in field-structured data remain. - Trustworthy computing
Related content: methods to push security and privacy problems into the programming environment, or alternatively, to hold the modules within the computational environment responsible for prohibiting violations. - Ubiquitous computing and semantic web
Related content: a variant of policy specification and enforcement research (though separately identified) focused on networks of sensors, cameras, and web locations.
- Other areas
Privacy technology analyses from Economic, Legal, and Policy perspectives.