November 2025: Privacy Preserving Data Processing for Transportation Applications

When
Wednesday, November 05, 2025 11:00 AM EST

Who
Mike Koets, Staff Engineer, SwRI

What
“Privacy Preserving Data Processing for Transportation Applications”

Description
New transportation system technologies, including Vehicle to Everything (V2X) and automated cameras employing artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision (CV), will produce large quantities of precision data. This data could enable valuable services and improve the management of roadway infrastructure. New sensing technologies also present new risks to user privacy, revealing sensitive information about the behavior of roadway users. Simple anonymization of such data has proven to be inadequate, as individual identities are readily reconstructed from the data set. Public concerns about the privacy consequences of pervasive surveillance technologies led to the abandonment of major projects. Governmental and technical organizations are engaged in setting standards for the ethical usage of these data.

This research investigated techniques for transportation data collection, communication, and processing that preserve the usefulness of data while protecting the privacy of users. We explored data protection methods, formulated solutions to transportation problems, analyzed the capabilities and limitations of each approach, and created initial prototypes to support future work. Research efforts focused on three sample problems in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) domain, identifying key considerations and formulating multiple solutions to each.