Comment by ghaff

I haven't followed what she's been working on recently.

But, yeah, at some point in the 90s, Massachusetts decided to release some "anonymized" health records for research purposes (I think just state employees). One was governor William Weld who obviously had a lot of public information widely available. As I recall, Sweeney wrote the governor's office a bit later basically saying "I have your medical records."

I used this as a slide or two in some AI presentations in the mid-2000s or so pre-LLMs when I had some peripheral involvement with some of the privacy-preserving research going on (differential privacy, multiparty computation, fully homomorphic encryption). Haven't really followed most of this for a while.