While the ever increasing computational power together with the huge amount of individual data collected daily by various agencies is of great value for our society, they also pose a significant threat to individuals’ privacy. As a result legislators for many countries try to regulate the use and the disclosure of confidential information. Various privacy regulations (such as USA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Canadian Standard Association’s Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information, Australian Privacy Amendment Act 2000, etc.) have been enacted in many countries all over the world. Data privacy and protecting individuals’ anonymity have become a mainstream avenue for research. While privacy is a topic discussed everywhere, data anonymity recently established itself as an emerging area of computer science. Its goal is to produce useful computational solutions for releasing data, while providing scientific guarantees that the identities and other sensitive information of the individuals who are the subjects of the data are protected.

The PAIS’08 Workshop will provide an open yet focused platform for researchers and practitioners from computer science and other fields that are interacting with computer science in the privacy area such as statistics, healthcare informatics, and law to discuss and present current research challenges and advances in data privacy and anonymity research. We welcome original research papers that present novel research ideas, position papers that discuss new technology trends and provide new insights into this area, integrative papers that present interdisciplinary research in the privacy area, as well as industry papers that share practical experiences.