Privacy preserving data analysis

Theoretical computer science formulated the basic notions of how to analyze data without revealing any more information than is necessary for the analysis (more or less). The bottomline is a lot of computations can be done in that manner, although with some computational overhead. A nice set of algorithmic tools have also been developed for specific problems. A collection of papers can be found here. These techniques are now being adopted to other communities, eg.,

• databases, see eg., here.
  
• networking, see eg., here by Matt Roughan and Yin Zhang.
  

There is a real need to formulate and address problems with social network analysis using privacy preserving methods.