Briefs

January 30, 2006

Jeff Jonas is an IBM engineer who specializes in software that infuses powerful search technology with anonymity.

By Kate Greene

In 1983, entrepreneur Jeff Jonas founded Systems Research and Development (SRD), a firm that provided software to identify people and determine who was in their circle of friends. In the early 1990s, the company moved to Las Vegas, where it worked on security software for casinos. Then, in January 2005, IBM acquired SRD and Jonas became chief scientist in the company's Entity Analytic Solutions group.

His newest technology, which allows entities such as government agencies to match an individual found in one database to that same person in another database, is getting a lot of attention from governments, banks, health-care providers, and, of course, privacy advocates. Jonas claims that his technology is as good at protecting privacy as it as at finding important information.

Technology Review: Your most recent project at IBM, Anonymous Resolution [formerly known as ANNA], is software that can match a given individual across different databases, but in the process safeguards personal identifiers -- for example, name and social security number -- in those databases. Who would use this software? What problem does it solve?

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