Enhancing Privacy

Yidan Hu’s research lab focuses on effective privacy-enhancing techniques to protect individual data privacy while still allowing a data collector to learn valuable information about a population of interest.

The massive collection of user data has raised significant privacy concerns among the general public. The disclosing of personal information can lead to invasive profiling, and there has been an increasing number of data breaches at major companies that have resulted in billions of identity records being posted on websites for sale

The advances her team is making in data privacy techniques will enable the privacy protection of sensitive individual data in web, mobile, and IoT applications while still enabling scientific research to be conducted with these large data sets. This will have an impact on so much of our daily life, from the way we interact with our healthcare to public safety and transportation.

In 2022, Hu was recognized with a Meta Research Award in the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies category for her project, titled “Protecting location privacy for augmented reality.” She aims to better protect the location privacy of augmented reality users who are on the move.