Latanya Sweeney and Andrea Matwyshyn to Join FTC
Today, the FTC announced that the appointment of Latanya Sweeney to serve as the agency’s Chief Technologist and Andrea Matwyshyn as a Senior Policy Advisor on privacy and data security issues.
Dr. Sweeney is well-known for her hardline criticism of “anonymity” in publicly released datasets. In 1997, Sweeney used seemingly anonymous medical data to demonstrate that she could identify sensitive health information about William Weld, then governor of Massachusetts.
Her studies have been widely celebrated in the privacy community, and her efforts have cast scrutiny on the state of de-identification best practices. As the founder and director of Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab, Dr. Sweeney continues to work to develop better, more complex algorithmic solutions to protect individual privacy. More recently, Sweeney has suggested that Google search results may demonstrate “racial bias in society.” According to the study, she found that searches of names typically associated with minorities are more likely to generate advertising related to criminal activity.
Dr. Matwyshyn is an assistant professor in Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, where she focuses on technology innovation and its legal implications for corporate information security and consumer privacy. She’s written widely about “hackers” and their relationship to the law. Many of her works also focus on machine-human convergence and what sorts of educational efforts and legal rules are needed to encourage technological entrepreneurship. She will join the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning in December to advise on privacy and data security policy.
