Though my report is a bit late, I take the chance to highlight and praise the initiative taken by two colleagues, Ulf Brefeld (TU Darmstadt) and Thorsten Strufe (TU Dresden), who have organised the Workshop on Privacy and Inference (PRINF), held in Dresden in September. Collecting personal data and linking them to obtain a more complete profile of people is becoming a widespread activity for many respected companies, but also for fraudsters. Nowadays, both criminal activities and privacy protection countermeasures rely heavily on statistical inference. The recognition of the important role played by this branch of research is at the basis of the organization of PRINF. I presented a paper (co-authored with Giuseppe D'Acquisto) on the use of option contracts in a market where some suppliers wish to stay in the market and sell goods, while protecting their personal data (e.g., the level of their stock) at the same time. I hope that privacy-related workshops and conferences will devote more and more space to the use of statistical inference tools in the future.
