Unlock the value of your data, without losing user trust.
We are privacy-enhancing technology experts, helping organizations do more with data in a safe and respectful way, with built-in compliance. Get in touch!
What we do
Break down data barriers
Valuable data is often locked away for privacy or compliance reasons. Such a missed opportunity!
We can build and deploy data products that empower you to share, publish, or monetize data, with rock-solid privacy guarantees: you extract more value out of your data, while your lawyers can sleep soundly at night.
Keep privacy risk in check
Anonymization and synthetic data technology can fail in unexpected ways. Relying on them can be pretty scary!
We can audit your existing uses of privacy technology, provide an independent assessment of their safety guarantees, and work with you to mitigate any identified issues.
Define your privacy strategy
Ever-changing ecosystems and privacy regulations force organizations to constantly play catch-up. This is exhausting!
We can help you inform your privacy strategy with focused advice on privacy-enhancing technology, so you can confidently decide where to focus future investment, and up-skill your teams.
About us
Dr. Damien Desfontaines founded Hiding Nemo to help organizations do more with data, while providing robust privacy protections to their users. He is a renowned expert in privacy-enhancing technology, with a focus on differential privacy. His career highlights include:
- Leading the anonymization consulting team at Google, providing guidance on policy and technical design for dozens of high-profile launches.
- Obtaining his PhD from ETH Zürich, publishing award-winning work on differential privacy in top-tier scientific venues.
- Designing and building leading open-source software platforms for provably robust anonymization, like GoogleDP or Tumult Analytics.
- Training dozens of people, in both technical and non-technical roles, to help them understand and deploy privacy-enhancing technologies for real-world use cases.
His blog post series on differential privacy is a reference introduction to provably robust anonymization methods, widely praised by technical and non-technical audiences alike.
Testimonials
Damien was a key component in launching the Community Mobility Reports, a project which required bulletproof anonymization of some of the world's most sensitive data. Damien and his team were tasked with this and delivered, under extreme pressure, a solution which was lauded worldwide. Through his work, we safely shared data that impacted the decisions of leaders around the world.
Andrew Oplinger
Senior Staff Privacy Engineer, Google
Damien has the perfect mixture of deep technical expertise, business understanding, and communication excellence. We hired him as a keynote speaker for the conference AnoSiDat 2024. He nicely boiled complicated technical challenges down and connected them to business decisions, which set the perfect tone for our conference.
Esfandiar Mohammadi
Associate Professor, University of Lübeck
Dr. Desfontaines led the technical test on the privacy risks of a large-scale customer-facing queryable analytics platform, and discovered that existing privacy protections were insufficient, as it only took a few days to re-identify individuals. Most importantly, he suggested applicable and reasonable fixes, and built a clear narrative for the problem and the solution.
Rebecca Balebako
CEO, Brandworthy.AI
Damien was an integral contributor to the Wikimedia Foundation's differentially private pageview data release, helping to shepherd it from concept to experiment to a deployed data product. He is particularly gifted at listening to, communicating with, and educating every member of an organization about differential privacy, from the C-suite to product owners to individual contributors.
Hal Triedman
Senior Privacy Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
Damien's guidance evolved my rudimentary understanding of differential privacy to an understandable chapter and open-source code — all within 2 months. His deep technical expertise, teaching and communication experience and his sharp ability to identify potential misunderstandings and address them make him an amazing advisor to any differential privacy or privacy risk problem.
Katharine Jarmul
Principal Data Scientist, Thoughtworks
Contact us
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