IBM researcher eyes databases with a conscience

Most people don't think twice about offering any information to their doctor or physician, and possible misuse of the data won't keep them up at night worrying. But when it comes to supplying the most mundane personal information for storage in a computer database, the reaction is different.

With headlines telling of purposeful and inadvertent data leaks and system intrusions, people are becoming increasingly aware of the amount of personal data held on them in a myriad of databases from government agencies to credit card companies, their employer or even the local dry cleaners. A researcher at IBM Corp. is hoping to change this air of mistrust by duplicating the very basis of our trust in our physicians.

"I had been doing work in data mining and people were starting to worry about data mining becoming too powerful a technology," said Rakesh Agrawal, an IBM fellow and lead scientist on a new database project at IBM's Almaden Research Center. "I was talking about this with my brother, Rajeev, who is a doctor and he said 'When we are studying to be a doctor, we take the Hippocratic oath and that is one of the biggest tenets in medicine.'"

The oath is a wide-ranging code of ethics for doctors that includes a strong commitment to privacy, in part: "Whatever in connection with my professional practice or not in connection with it I may see or hear in the lives of my patients ... I will not divulge, reckoning that all such should be kept secret."

"I started wondering why databases cannot be like that," said Agrawal, who then set off to build a database system that had at its foundation a responsibility for the data it holds.

The result is a blueprint for a Hippocratic database that not just specifies to users how and where the data collected will be used and where it will be shared, but crucially also includes a verification element to make sure the system is living up to its promises. Agrawal presented details of the system at the Very Large Databases 2002 conference in Hong Kong last week.

Here's how it works:

Before data is collected, the types of information to be obtained and basic rules about how the data will be used are decided. These rules include who should have access to the data and how long it will be retained. When it comes time for a user to enter information, an application at the user end will interact with the database to check that its data privacy policies are acceptable to the user, who has already programmed their preferences into the application. Once verified, data is transferred from the user to the database.

"Right now, if you look at a database, they just keep records but there is no instructions about what you can do with the data. (With a Hippocratic database) when you collect data, you attach a reason for why you are collecting the data."

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