Protecting Privacy in Digital Records: The Potential of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With increased concerns about data protection and privacy over the past several years, and concomitant introduction of regulations restricting access to personal information (PI), archivists in many jurisdictions now must undertake ‘sensitivity reviews’ of archival documents to determine whether they can make those documents accessible to researchers. Such reviews are onerous given increasing volume of records and complex due to how difficult it can be for archivists to identify whether records contain PI under the provisions of various laws. Despite research into the application of tools and techniques to automate sensitivity reviews, effective solutions remain elusive. Not yet explored as a solution to the challenge of enabling access to archival holdings subject to privacy restrictions is the application of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) —a class of emerging technologies that rest on the assumption that a body of documents is confidential or private and must remain so. While seemingly being counterintuitive to apply PETs to making archives more accessible, we argue that PETs could provide an opportunity to protect PI in archival holdings whilst still enabling research on those holdings. In this article, to lay a foundation for archival experimentation with use of PETs, we contribute an overview of these technologies based on a scoping review and discuss possible use cases and future research directions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it