The centre’s flagship project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under its Bridge Discovery programme — the joint SNSF–Innosuisse scheme for translating research into practice. It develops privacy-preserving technologies that let event-based and longitudinal data — records that follow the same people, households, or firms over time — be analysed and shared without exposing the individuals behind them.
The work spans three fronts: masking geo-location and trajectory data so movement patterns cannot be traced back to a person; protecting event-history and life-course data, where the sequence of events is itself identifying; and pushing re-identification-risk assessment beyond classical k-anonymity, with density-based risk metrics and realistic attacker simulations. Methods are developed and validated on real longitudinal data — among them the Swiss TREE panel (Transitions from Education to Employment) — and released as open, reproducible tools. The project is led by Prof. Dr. Matthias Templ (FHNW) with co-investigator Prof. Dr. Murat Sariyar (BFH).
