Latanya Sweeney

Latanya Sweeney
Professor Sweeney speaking about social security numbers
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Harvard University
Known for	k-anonymity
Website latanyasweeney.org

Latanya Arvette Sweeney is a Professor of Government and Technology in Residence at Harvard University and the Director of the Data Privacy Lab in the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard. She served as the Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, a position she has held from January 2014 until December 2014. She has made several contributions to privacy technology. Her best known academic work is on the theory of k-anonymity and she is credited with the observation that "87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by date of birth, gender, postal code."

Sweeney develops technology to assess and solve societal problems and teaches others how to use the same technology. She has made several discoveries related to identifiability and privacy technologies. Her work has received awards from numerous organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Her work was praised in the TAPAC Report that reviewed the Total Information Awareness Project of DARPA. She has testified before the Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee of the Department of Homeland Security and the European Union Commission. Sweeney was a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2001, she received her PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in computer science from that school. Her undergraduate degree in computer science was completed at Harvard University.