Release: Vast improvements in computing and communications are creating new
opportunities for improving life and health, eliminating barriers to
education and employment, and enabling advances in many sectors of the
economy. The promise of these new applications frequently comes from
their ability to create, collect, process, and archive information on a
massive scale.
However, the rapid increase in the quantity of personal information
that is being collected and retained, combined with our increased
ability to analyze and combine it with other information, is creating
concerns about privacy. When information about people and their
activities can be collected, analyzed, and repurposed in so many ways,
it can create new opportunities for crime, discrimination, inadvertent
disclosure, embarrassment, and harassment.
This Administration has been a strong champion of initiatives to improve the state of privacy, such as the “
Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” proposal and the creation of the
Federal Privacy Council. Similarly, the White House report
Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values highlights
the need for large-scale privacy research, stating: “We should
dramatically increase investment for research and development in
privacy-enhancing technologies, encouraging cross-cutting research that
involves not only computer science and mathematics, but also social
science, communications and legal disciplines.”
Today, we are pleased to release the
National Privacy Research Strategy.
Research agencies across government participated in the development of
the strategy, reviewing existing Federal research activities in
privacy-enhancing technologies, soliciting inputs from the private
sector, and identifying priorities for privacy research funded by the
Federal Government. The National Privacy Research Strategy calls for
research along a continuum of challenges, from how people understand
privacy in different situations and how their privacy needs can be
formally specified, to how these needs can be addressed, to how to
mitigate and remediate the effects when privacy expectations are
violated. This strategy proposes the following priorities for privacy
research:
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Foster a multidisciplinary approach to privacy research and solutions;
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Understand and measure privacy desires and impacts;
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Develop system design methods that incorporate privacy desires, requirements, and controls;
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Increase transparency of data collection, sharing, use, and retention;
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Assure that information flows and use are consistent with privacy rules;
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Develop approaches for remediation and recovery; and
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Reduce privacy risks of analytical algorithms.
With this strategy, our goal is to produce knowledge and technology
that will enable individuals, commercial entities, and the Federal
Government to benefit from technological advancements and data use while
proactively identifying and mitigating privacy risks. Following the
release of this strategy, we are also launching a Federal Privacy
R&D Interagency Working Group, which will lead the coordination of
the Federal Government’s privacy research efforts. Among the group’s
first public activities will be to host a workshop to discuss the
strategic plan and explore directions of follow-on research. It is our
hope that this strategy will also inspire parallel efforts in the
private sector.
