Release of Private 0.9 – for people who analyse sensitive personal data

Current languages for data analysis such as R, python or Matlab provide no protection for the sensitive personal data that researchers commonly encounter. Data is often available in its raw form and can be freely copied. Private creates a buffer between the data and the analyst that allows companies and institutions to provide access to […]

Combining events of different types in Private

It is often the case that one would like to combine events of different types that happened at approximately the same time. For instance, suppose you would like to know how temperature affects whether people are happy. The temperature can be found in App events, while a rating of happiness might be found in SEMA […]

Private Events

In every Private language shell, there is a special variable called Events that contains the data that is available in this context. This variable is always private, and so you will not be able to look at it directly. To program with these data structures you need to know the format of the data. On […]

Phone call and SMS events in Private

Using the IFTTT service Unforgettable can receive phone call and SMS events as follows: Android Call sent Android Call received SMS Sent SMS Received Obfuscated SMS Sent Obfuscated SMS Received

Email Events in Private

Unforgettable Research Services provides a service that allows participants to forward their emails to the system. Below is an example of an email event within Private generated by such a forward.

SEMA Events in Private

The Smartphone Ecological Momentary Assessment 3 (SEMA3) app allows you to administer micro-surveys to participants across a day with a variety of schedules that you can specify in the SEMA3 system. These can be loaded into Unforgettable and made available to researchers through the Private webshell. At the bottom of the post is an example […]

App Events in Private

Each instance of the Private shell provides a variable called Events that contains the data that is available in this context. Events is a list of event instances of different types. One of the main kinds of events is the App event. These events are generated when a participant is using the Unforgettable Research Services’ […]

Plotting in Private

Below are a set of examples of plotting in Private. I will update this post later with more explanation, but in the meantime these should provide some insight into how to construct plots. Note the Private plotting functions are based on the seaborn plotting library. Acknowledgement: The plotting functionality and examples have been developed by […]

Manifold Privacy: A Practical Approach to Computational Privacy for Analysis Languages

Much of the research conducted in my lab relies on using sensors and other data streams generated by smartphones, online services and IoT devices to understand human memory. Naturally, people are protective of this data. We have developed a ecosystem that strives to collect data in ways that maximise the control people have over their […]

Bayesian Inference with Private Data

In the last tutorial, we discussed how to estimate quantities using experience sampling data that may be sensitive and therefore private. This time we are going to talk about how to do Bayesian inference, that is, how to test hypotheses. We’ll start by considering inference in general and then explore an example using experience sampling […]