PRIVACY Challenge seminar: What Does It Mean to Keep a Secret? Privacy Concepts from Computer Science

Join us for a PRIVACY Challenge Seminar with professor of computer science Rasmus Pagh (University of Copenhagen).

How do computer scientists define privacy, and what do their definitions leave out? This talk offers a guided tour of the main ideas, each illustrated by a small example that needs only elementary arithmetic. We start with encryption and access control, then see how colleagues can compute their average salary without revealing any individual salary. We examine k-anonymity, the intuitive promise that everyone hides in a crowd, and see exactly how it breaks. This leads to differential privacy, where calibrated randomness ensures that a published result barely depends on any one person, and to randomized response, a coin-flip survey that protects individuals while still revealing the population. For each notion we ask what it guarantees and what it leaves out, such as purpose, context and consent, as a starting point for discussion. The talk is aimed at scholars in the humanities and law. No background in mathematics or computer science is assumed.

The seminar is open to all. Sign up here.