Research & Ethics

In 2021, challenges faced by academics in accessing corporate data sets for research and the issues that companies were experiencing to make privacy-respecting research data available broke into the news. With its long history of research data sharing, FPF saw an opportunity to bring together leaders from the corporate, research, and policy communities for a conversation […]

There are many different uses of the term “data sharing” to describe a relationship between parties who share data from one organization to another organization for a new purpose.  Some uses of the term data sharing are related to academic and scientific research purposes, and some are related to transfer of data for commercial or government purposes. ..it is imperative that we are more precise which forms of sharing we are referencing so that the interests of the parties are adequately considered, and the various risks and benefits are appropriately contextualized and managed.

The Future of Privacy Forum invites privacy scholars and authors with an interest in privacy issues to submit finished papers to be considered for FPF’s 12th annual Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award. This award provides researchers with the opportunity to inject ideas into the current policy discussion, bringing relevant privacy research to the attention of the U.S. […]

Digital data is a strategic asset for business. It is also an asset for researchers seeking to answer socially beneficial questions using company held data. Research using secondary data introduces new challenges and ethical concerns for research administrators and research ethics committees, like IRBs.  FPF Senior Researcher, AI & Ethics, Dr. Sara Jordan, analyzes some […]

The second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship honors two teams of researchers and corporate partners for their commitment to privacy and ethical uses of data in their efforts to research aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. One team is a collaboration between Stanford Medicine researchers led by Tejaswini Mishra, PhD, Professor Michael Snyder, PhD, and […]

Tejaswini Mishra, PhD, Michael Snyder, PhD, Erika Mahealani Hunting, Alessandra Celli, Arshdeep Chauhan, and Jessi Wanyi Li from the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics, and Empatica Inc. are the recipients of the second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship. The collaboration between the research team from Stanford Medicine and Empatica, a medical […]

Google has been recognized with the second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship for its work to produce, aggregate, anonymize, and share data on community movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Google’s Community Mobility Reports go through a robust anonymization process that employs differential privacy techniques to ensure that personal data, including an individual’s location, movement, […]

FPF is collaborating with a team of researchers to build a searchable database of privacy policies and other privacy-related documents. The PrivaSeer project, led by researchers from Penn State and the University of Michigan, has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to ease the process of collecting and utilizing privacy […]

FPF has launched an independent ethical review committee to provide oversight for research projects that rely upon sharing of corporate data with researchers. Whether researchers are studying the impact of platforms on society, supporting evidence based policymaking, or understanding issues from COVID to climate change, personal data held by companies is increasingly essential to advancing scientific knowledge.

Scientific research is often dependent on access to personal information, whether collected directly from individuals or collected for a real-world use and then accessed for research. For research to be trusted, processing of personal information must be lawful, ethical and subject to privacy and security protections. Supporting responsible research is a priority for FPF: Data […]