Latanya Sweeney — SPARQNOW

At-a-Glance

Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Founder and director of the Public Interest Tech Lab (2021) and the Data Privacy Lab.
Credited with the theory of k-anonymity and the observation that '87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by date of birth, gender, postal code'.
Her re-identification experiments significantly impacted privacy policy, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Former Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission.
First Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT (2001).
Named one of the world's top thinkers in artificial intelligence by TIME magazine in 2025.

Biography

Latanya Sweeney is an American computer scientist and the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She is the founder and director of the Public Interest Tech Lab, established in 2021 with a $3 million grant from the Ford Foundation, and also leads the Data Privacy Lab. She serves as the current Faculty Dean in Currier House at Harvard.