2009 Australian Privacy Awards

November 13th, 2009 - We received a "Highly Commended" in our category at the Australian Privacy Awards.

Read Don McIntosh's blog post "Hey, that's just what we do!!"

October 7th, 2009 — Space-Time research is proud to announce that we have been chosen as a finalist in the Australian Privacy Awards for the second year running.

This year our focus for the awards was the data privacy protection work developed for our SuperWEB product. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) uses SuperWEB in their Table Builder and CDATA Online census products. Being selected as a finalist affirms our belief that innovative, appropriate use of data privacy protection techniques will make many government and research data resources publicly available for the first time.

Space-Time Research worked with the ABS to deliver easy-to-use Web applications that enable users to run detailed, ad hoc queries on census data, while ensuring a very high level of privacy protection. Users can access highly detailed statistical information about the census, but not discover sensitive personal information such as the income or religion of individual citizens.

The significance of Space-Time Research’s success lies in the automation of data privacy protection processes that have historically been manually intensive, complex, and difficult to apply without reducing the usefulness of the data. The process we have developed for the ABS simplifies data protection procedures, is robust, and enables customers to self serve their queries.

For example, users can now, in just a few seconds, retrieve data that previously entailed a manual process that took weeks. The near instant turnaround time for queries means that data is now more open for exploration and can be used in time-critical studies—previously users had to make do with lower quality or less specific data to support analyses because of delays in accessing the right data.

Additionally, the ABS experience has shown that the easy online access to census data and the automation of many information requests is resulting in a much wider use of census data.

Don McIntosh, Director of Product Planning at Space-Time Research, said, “Privacy laws are sometimes interpreted to mean that certain kinds of government data cannot be made publically available, or in cases where they are made available, the data is only provided in a very aggregated form. Wide use of the new, customizable disclosure control tools we have developed will lead to much more data being made available in the public space. This is also exciting because it expands our role as an enabler for Government 2.0 initiatives that focus on delivering more detailed data to the public to facilitate transparency and promote innovation.”

Space-Time Research’s privacy protection process has now been made available for use by other Official Statistics Providers.

The Privacy Award Application "Intelligent Data Protection Project" details Space-Time Research’s submission to the privacy awards, describing what we did for the Australian Bureau of Statistics in automating services for customers to access detailed census results, and how that has benefited the ABS.

Download Space-Time Research's "Intelligent Data Protection Project" application.
A4 Letter

For more details about Space-Time Research and privacy protection, see the Confidentiality section on our website.