Projects
Work that’s helping us plan a path forward.
Our Private Map Maker
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Read more and try it out.
Online Data Collection Forums
We believe that online forums could become places where communities can pool and disseminate personal information in concrete, measurable ways to advocate for a cause, enable research and inform policy-making. We are working on educating the public and nonprofit organizations on how that could be possible. Learn more about it in this series of blog posts.
Building a Datatrust Prototype
In partnership with Shan Gao Ma, we are working on building a stripped down prototype of the datatrust that would support importing a rich data set and a basic set of queries. More to come on this project!
Our Privacy Policy: What if the government asks for data?
A quick overview of the current state of online privacy rights, how they apply to the datatrust and a running list of open issues we will eventually need to resolve in our privacy policy. Read.
Exploring Privacy Technologies
In our efforts to up the ante on privacy standards, we've been working on technical explorations of differential privacy, a new area of research that attempts to quantify privacy risk so that privacy promises can be measured and verified. We believe such technology will transform consumers' ability to make meaningful demands about exactly how much privacy they're willing to give up in exchange for services.
In particular, we've created a demo using PINQ, an implementation of differential privacy by Microsoft research Frank McSherry. You can read more about our demo on our blog. We are also delving into exactly "how much" is "too much" privacy risk so that we can quantitatively define imprecise terms used in privacy policies today, such as "anonymous" and "almost indiscernible."