Latanya Sweeney facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Latanya Sweeney
Sweeney at a panel discussion in New York City, November 2017
Education	Harvard University (ALB) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SM, PhD)
Known for	k-anonymity
Scientific career
Fields	Computer Scientist Science communication
Institutions	Harvard University Carnegie Mellon University
Thesis	Computational Disclosure Control: Theory and Practice (2001)

Latanya Sweeney is a brilliant American computer scientist. She teaches at Harvard University, where she helps students understand how technology and government work together. She also started two important labs: the Public Interest Tech Lab and the Data Privacy Lab. These labs study how technology affects people and how to keep our information safe.

Professor Sweeney used to be the main technology expert for the Federal Trade Commission, a government group that protects consumers. She is famous for her ideas about "k-anonymity," which is a way to protect people's private information in large datasets. She once showed that even if your name is removed, 87% of people in the U.S. could still be identified using just their birth date, gender, and zip code! This discovery helped everyone understand how important data privacy is.

In 2025, TIME magazine recognized her as one of the top thinkers in artificial intelligence worldwide.

Latanya Sweeney's Educational Journey

Latanya Sweeney finished high school in 1977 at Dana Hall School in Massachusetts. She was such a good student that she gave the farewell speech at her graduation!

She started studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Later, she took a break to start her own company. She then finished her first college degree in computer science at Harvard University's Extension School. In 2001, she earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. She was the first Black woman to achieve this! She explained that she went back to school because she wanted to share her amazing discoveries with the world.

Latanya Sweeney's Amazing Career

In 2001, Professor Sweeney started the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. This lab focused on keeping personal information safe. She also helped guide discussions about artificial intelligence in 2005. In 2004, she created a special magazine called the Journal of Privacy Technology, where she later became the main editor.

Protecting Your Health Information

In 1997, Latanya Sweeney did an important experiment. She showed how easy it could be to link a person's medical records to their identity, even if their name was removed. She used public information to identify the Governor of Massachusetts at the time, Bill Weld, to his health records. This discovery was a big deal! It helped create new laws to protect health privacy, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S.

Her research showed that we need better ways to share data safely. She explained that by looking at public health records and news stories, it was possible to connect people to their private health details. This proved that new and improved methods for sharing data are really important.

Understanding How Data Can Identify You

In 1998, Professor Sweeney shared another famous example. She showed that even if a medical dataset had no names, it could still be used to identify people. She did this by matching it with a public list of voters. She found that for 87% of the U.S. population, combining a few pieces of information (like birth date, gender, and zip code) could uniquely identify them. These pieces of information are called "quasi-identifiers." This work taught us that just removing names isn't enough to keep data private.

The Data Privacy Lab at Harvard

Since 2011, Professor Sweeney's Data Privacy Lab has been at Harvard University. Here, researchers from different fields like computer science, law, and social studies work together to understand data privacy. One big project, called theDataMap, helps show how personal information moves around in the U.S. This helps leaders and the public understand how their data is used.

The Public Interest Tech Lab

In 2021, Professor Sweeney started another lab at Harvard called the Public Interest Tech Lab. It received a $3 million grant to study how technology affects society and to create projects that help people.

One project, FBarchive, created a searchable website for internal Facebook (now Meta) documents that were shared by a whistleblower in 2021. This helped people understand more about how social media companies work.

The Lab also created VoteFlare. This service helps people keep track of their voter registration. It sends alerts if their records change unexpectedly. VoteFlare has helped researchers learn more about how accurate voter registration is and how to prevent people from being wrongly removed from voter lists. Another Lab project, MyDataCan, gives people tools to manage their own personal data, helping them keep their information private.

See also

• Datafly algorithm
• Data re-identification