Notes & field reports
Talks, workshops, conferences, and writing from the centre — what we present, where, and what we learn.
Our agentic AI study on the NZZ Akzent podcast
The NZZ's daily news podcast «NZZ Akzent» devoted an episode to our agentic AI study: technology editor Gioia da Silva and clips of Oscar Thees explain how AI makes mass surveillance from location data surprisingly easy.
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Agentic AI-powered re-identification presented at PSD 2026 in Cádiz
At Privacy in Statistical Databases (PSD 2026) in Cádiz, Oscar Thees and Roman Müller presented our study showing how large-language-model agents can autonomously re-identify people from mobility data and public sources.
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Our agentic AI study in the NZZ
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on our study of agentic AI and mobility data. Our message: location data sold without names can be traced back to individuals with little effort once AI agents do the work.
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Identifying high-risk records in synthetic data with RAPID at the Swiss Statistics Meeting 2026
At the Swiss Statistics Meeting 2026 at Würth Haus Rorschach, Oscar Thees presented how RAPID flags individual high-risk records in synthetic data and asked whether prediction without access is already a privacy violation.
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SwissAnon in Tokyo: Statistical Disclosure Control Meets Cryptography
In mid-August 2026, Matthias Templ presented SwissAnon's SDC research in Tokyo — a seminar at the University of Tokyo's Center for Spatial Information Science, and an informal SDC4Society research exchange hosted by Prof. Kazuhiro Minami, with talks on differential privacy for Japan's census and predictive data-utility measures, plus a first conversation about Swiss–Japanese collaboration.
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RAPID and the new riskutility R package at useR! 2026 in Warsaw
At useR! 2026 in Warsaw, Oscar Thees presented RAPID, our measure of attribute-inference risk in synthetic data, and the new CRAN package riskutility, which bundles around 100 risk and utility measures.
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SwissAnon at Data Protection Day 2026: Four Hands-On sdcMicro Workshops in Zurich
At the University of Zurich's Data Protection Day 2026, SwissAnon lead Matthias Templ delivered the hands-on "Working with sdcMicro" workshop four times, taking a real research dataset from re-identifiable to safely shareable live in the sdcMicro app.
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Workshop recap: Anonymization and pseudonymization of research data (Latvia 2026)
A two-day online training on statistical disclosure control, delivered for Latvia's Higher Education and Science IT Shared Service Centre (VPC).
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Workshop Recap: Anonymization and Synthetic Data – Methods, Tools, and Applications
SwissAnon hosted a one-day workshop in Olten on January 26, 2026, attracting 19 professionals from Switzerland and across Europe for hands-on training in anonymization techniques and synthetic data generation.
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Talk on Anonymizing Longitudinal Panel Data at Statistical Days 2025 in Geneva
At the Swiss Statistics Meeting (Statistical Days 2025) in Geneva, Oscar Thees presented research on the distinctive privacy challenges of panel datasets, where trajectories across time make individuals more identifiable.
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Reflections from Barcelona: Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Confidentiality 2025
From October 15–17, 2025, SwissAnon participated in the UNECE Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Confidentiality in Barcelona, where Roman Müller presented research on anonymizing sensitive psychological data for open science.
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DSEmbedded 2.0: Advancing Data Protection Literacy in Switzerland
Reto Bürgin has joined SwissAnon through the swissuniversities-backed DSEmbedded 2.0 initiative, which develops guidelines, tutorials, and advisory services to build data protection knowledge across Swiss research institutions.
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Workshop Announcement: Anonymization and Synthetic Data – Methods, Tools, and Applications
SwissAnon announces a hands-on one-day training workshop on data anonymization and synthetic data generation, to be held in Olten on January 26, 2026, led by Murat Sariyar and Matthias Templ.
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Workshop on Disclosure Risk at the Center for Clinical Research Zurich
Matthias Templ conducted a workshop at the Center for Clinical Research in Zurich on disclosure risk of anonymized and synthetic data, covering k-anonymity, l-diversity, and attacker scenarios for research managers and data stewards.
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Data Stewards and Anonymization and Synthetization of Data
Matthias Templ delivered a presentation on synthetic data generation and anonymization alternatives at the University of Bern for data stewards, co-organized with the Open Science Services team from University of Zurich and the University of Basel Data Stewardship Program.
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Presenting our Research on Synthetic Data at PSD2024 in Antibes
Oscar Thees and Murat Sariyar presented two papers on synthetic data generation at the Privacy for Statistical Databases conference (PSD2024) in Antibes, evaluating complex tabular data generators and comparing LLMs with GANs.
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Synthetic Data Day 2024
The University of Bern, its medical faculty, and Inselspital co-hosted Synthetic Data Day 2024 on May 27, 2024. Matthias Templ delivered the keynote on the importance and challenges of synthetic data; Murat Sariyar presented a comparison of LLMs and GANs for tabular data generation.
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Data Anonymization Workshop at useR! 2024 in Salzburg
SwissAnon delivered a three-hour workshop on 'Data Anonymization for Open Science' at the useR! 2024 conference in Salzburg, led by Oscar Thees and Jiri Novak, covering perturbation, non-perturbation, and synthetic methods.
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Annual Meeting of the Swiss Clinical Trial Organisation
Matthias Templ gave an invited presentation at the SCTO Statistics & Methodology platform meeting in Bern on SwissAnon's work on anonymization and synthetization, with a focus on membership attacks and the distinctive challenges of clinical trial data.
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Insights From the Stakeholder Day
SwissAnon held a stakeholder gathering in Olten on March 25, 2024, welcoming around 20 participants from government, academia, and the private sector to present the SNF Bridge Project and discuss practical anonymization challenges and collaborative opportunities.
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Workshop for Data Stewards at the University of Basel
Matthias Templ facilitated an introductory workshop on data anonymization of quantitative data for the University of Basel's Data Stewardship Programme, covering anonymization techniques, disclosure risk assessment, data utility, and attacker scenarios.
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Clarin Workshop on Sensitive Data
At a Clarin workshop on sensitive data on March 22, 2024, Melanie Röthlisberger demonstrated text anonymization tools and Matthias Templ presented sdcMicro as the state-of-the-art package for statistical disclosure control in R.