In a column for the Harvard Business Review, professors Sachin Gupta and Matthew Schneider argue that current business approaches to protecting consumer data — most notably, access control and pseudonymization — are "woefully inadequate" and "not sufficient," respectively. However, public agencies, such as the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Agriculture, protect data by systematically perturbing it via adding random noise, rounding information, creating synthetic data, among other methods. "We believe that businesses should consider taking a page out of the playbook of these agencies to strengthen their own data protection practices," Gupta and Schneider contend, while pointing to two articles (here and here) that demonstrate "how a statistical model can be used to convert original marketing data to synthetic data for the protection of consumers." 
Full Story