• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 19, 2013

Signaling its continuing interest in online privacy, the Federal Trade Commission has tapped privacy expert Latanya Sweeney to serve as the agency's chief technologist.

Sweeney, a computer scientist who directs Harvard's Data Privacy Lab, is possibly best-known for her research that cast doubt on so-called anonymization techniques. A 2000 study she did showed that 87% of the population could be identified based on just three data points -- gender, birthdate and ZIP code.

That work has been highly influential in other privacy experts' views about supposed “anonymization” techniques. For instance, law professor Paul Ohm -- who himself recently served a one-year stint at the FTC -- drew on Sweeney's work when he sounded the alarm about Netflix's 2009 plan to release “anonymized” information about its users' movie reviews. He exhorted the company to cancel its plans:

“Don’t do this to your customers, and don’t do this to your shareholders,” he wrote in a highly publicized blog post (Netflix retreated from its plans after some consumers sought a court order prohibiting the company from releasing the data.)

Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy for the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology, describes Sweeney in an email to MediaPost as a “heavy skeptic of the power of pseudonymization and anonymization techniques to preserve privacy."

Brookman, who now chairs the World Wide Web Consortium's do-not-track effort, says that he personally is “probably a little more optimistic about the privacy-preserving power of anonymization techniques.” But he adds: “I still think she's great, and it will be good to have her at the FTC.”

Her appointment comes as the online ad industry is increasingly discussing the feasibility of addressing privacy concerns by “de-identifying” data that's been collected from consumers as they surf the Web. This summer, a coalition of ad industry groups proposed to the W3C that companies need only de-identify data when users activate do-not-track signals. The group's leadership rejected that proposal, following which the industry group Digital Advertising Alliance walked out of talks.

Of course, the FTC doesn't directly participate in W3C talks. And the agency's chief technologist won't necessarily set policy. But her appointment still indicates that the FTC is interested in issues surrounding de-identification of data collected from consumers, as well as the limits of current anonymizing technology.