Privacy in the big data era: Guaranteeing anonymity when disclosing sensitive information

On July 1st our colleague Maikel Groenewoud gave a presentation about privacy in the big data era at the Social Sciences and the Internet Conference 2016 in Eindhoven. In this digital era, this information age, more and more data is being collected, combined, stored and automatically generated which brings new privacy challenges. There are various privacy challenges such as the re-use of data for purposes other than for which it was originally collected and the use of data by so-called third parties. In the research literature about privacy in relation to ‘big data’, several solutions are proposed including randomization and privacy by design. In his presentation he illustrates how the anonymity of people’s data can potentially be guaranteed when using the randomized response method.