Privacy Research and Development

The Privacy R&D Interagency Working Group (IWG) was formed in 2016 to coordinate Federal Privacy R&D across 14 participating agencies. Guided by the 2016 National Privacy Research Strategy, the IWG coordinates government investments in Privacy R&D preventing or mitigating adverse privacy effects arising from information processing. In addition, this R&D supports advances in large-scale data analytics that can improve healthcare, eliminate barriers to education and employment, and increase efficiencies in the transportation and financial sectors while minimizing risks to individual privacy and possible harms such as discrimination, loss of autonomy, and economic losses.

Strategic Priorities

• Understand privacy desires and impacts by creating models and conducting studies to understand privacy needs in different contexts.
• Adopt system design methods that incorporate privacy requirements and controls that can be adapted for domain-specific applications.
• Create information-use techniques that are consistent with privacy rules including encryption and engineering and technical standards.
• Enable user-driven controls and actions over data collection, use, and deletion in networking, mobile computing, and the IoT.
• Minimize reidentification risks while maximizing utility of data analytics including secure and private collaboration environments.
• Develop solutions for recovery from privacy violations that are fast, predictable, and easy to implement.