Technical Case Study of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for Public Health
This addresses the challenge of privacy-compliant data sharing for pandemic management, offering reusable tools for public health decision-making, though it is incremental in applying existing PETs to a specific domain.
The study tackled the problem of sharing sensitive financial data for public health by using Differential Privacy to create synthetic data, which demonstrated significant predictive power for epidemiological applications like hotspot detection and mobility analysis.
We present a technical case study on the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for Public Health Challenge, a collaborative effort to safely leverage sensitive private sector data for social impact, specifically pandemic management. The project utilized Differential Privacy (DP) to create realistic, privacy-preserved synthetic financial transaction data, which was then combined with public health and mobility datasets. This approach successfully addressed the critical hurdle of sharing sensitive financial information for research and policy. The analysis demonstrated that this synthetic, DP-protected data possesses significant spatial-temporal and predictive power for public health. Key outcomes include the development of six reusable tools and frameworks supporting diagnostic nowcasting (e.g., Hotspot Detection, Pandemic Adherence Monitoring) and predictive forecasting (e.g., Mobility Analysis, Contact Matrix Estimation) for epidemiological decision-making. The study provides best practices for advancing data sharing in a privacy-compliant manner.