Data Danger – Felix Bauer, Co-founder and CEO of Aircloak – Protecting Privacy and Security in the Digital World

Felix Bauer, co-founder, and CEO of Aircloak (aircloak.com) delivers an overview of security and privacy issues in an increasingly digital world. Felix Bauer studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge before bringing his talents to the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. He founded Aircloak in 2014 with co-founders, Paul Francis and Sebastian Probst Eide. Bauer is renowned for his work in privacy and security and is a regular guest speaker on the subject.

Aircloak enables organizations to analyze and work with personal data in a safe and legal manner via their unique approach to data anonymization. As data collection on literally every person and business alike is becoming more common and often expected, Aircloak seeks to be the bridge between data and security concerns. Estimations indicate that human data is growing at a rate ten times that of common business data, and with artificial intelligence mining for more and more data, privacy is a crucial principle for all businesses and organizations. Bauer describes Aircloak's principal product as a proxy that sits in-between a database and an analyst, which allows the analyst to work with any kind of sensitive data, to query the data, but the output is then anonymized to protect the privacy of the individuals or entities. This groundbreaking technology allows important and useful data to be utilized without breaching privacy regulations or laws.

From medical to financial applications and beyond, Aircloak's software is opening doors to data, but doing it the right way, the safe and legal way. Bauer discusses how their software can give marketing and data professionals access to valuable insider information in databases while maintaining absolute security and privacy protection of the identity of the individuals within those databases. Aircloak delivers the results marketers and data professionals are seeking in a manner that is 100% compliant with all regulations.

The privacy expert delivers an overview of the process that their software utilizes to pick through data. He details how their software responds to queries and pulls the requested information, then analyzes all the relevant information for identifying data that should not be disclosed. The software scrubs the data essentially and removes all the identifying information that is legally required and mandated to be kept private, confidential, and secure. Additionally, Aircloak's software is designed to fight against breaches, such as instances in which someone may be issuing lots of queries to try to single out a particular answer that is private. And to keep their software working at the highest level, Aircloak has established a program that invites individuals to make an attempt to hack their software and access private data.

If there is a successful breach, Aircloak's team gets to work to fix that breach immediately. However, it should be noted, out of 33,000,000 attempts, only two have been able to breach even minor data. Alarmingly, according to Bauer, 60% of the US population can be identified directly with access to only birth date, zip code, and gender. With data collection expanding exponentially, Aircloak's solutions are in high demand. From small organizations to large corporate businesses, the Aircloak system can be set up quickly on most systems to allow valuable data to be utilized right away.