Microsoft has just announced the world’s first open source platform for differential privacy, which is powered by the OpenDP Initiative developed by a team of researchers from Harvard.

The new platform, which is supposed to enable researchers to preserve privacy when analyzing datasets, the company explains in an announcement this week.

Microsoft says that beginning today, a royalty-free license under its differential privacy patents is available for anyone who wants to use the platform for data analysis.
Already available on GitHub

More specifically, the open-source platform for differential privacy makes it possible to look into data from customers without actually exposing the privacy of an individual. The accuracy of the analysis isn’t affected in any way, Microsoft says.

“Through these mechanisms, differential privacy protects personally identifiable information by preventing it from appearing in data analysis altogether. It further masks the contribution of an individual, essentially rendering it impossible to infer any information specific to any particular person,­ including whether the dataset utilized that individual’s information at all,” the software giant explains.

“As a result, outputs from data computations, including analytics and machine learning, do not reveal private information from the underlying data, which opens the door for researchers to harness and share massive quantities of data in a manner and scale never seen before.”

The work on the project started many months ago, and Microsoft says that its team and the Harvard researchers have been trying to build this platform for nearly a year, just to make sure that everything is running just as intended.

The open-source nature of the platform allows anyone to validate the implementation, while also enabling developers and researchers to further contribute to its development, thus improving the technology even further in the long term.

Both the differential privacy platform and the algorithms used to power the whole thing are now listed on GitHub for testing, building, and support.

Open Source is the future. Great Initiative