Last update: 2025-07-08

A picture of me, smiling, looking to the right.

Hello!

My name is Damien Desfontaines — also known as Ted, or any pseudonym recognized by the (Ted)+ regular expression — and this is the sober version of my personal webpage. The fancier one, which is now quite outdated, can be found here.

About me

I'm the founder of Hiding Nemo, an independent consultancy helping organizations do more with data in a responsible way, using privacy-enhancing technology.

Before that, I led the anonymization consulting team at Google, and worked as a staff scientist at Tumult Labs. In both jobs, I focused on making it easier to deploy differential privacy for practical applications.

In December 2020, I defended my PhD thesis at ETH Zürich, which I worked on part-time in the Information Security Group, under the supervision of David Basin.

Previously, I studied at the École normale supérieure, where I completed a Master's degree in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science called the LMFI.

You can find more information on my LinkedIn profile. I'm also on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Research

When I was studying for my Master's degree, I did research in theoretical computer science, and more specifically computability theory.

Since then, I've been working on data anonymization, and more specifically differential privacy.

I serve as a program committee member for PETS (since 2020), PEPR (since 2022), and TPDP (since 2025); I was also in the program committee of PPAI in 2023. If you'd like to invite me to volunteer for another scientific conference or journal, please consult this blog post first.

Other publications, talks, interviews, etc.

Contact

To get in touch with me, you can send an e-mail to se.niatnofsed@neimad (beware when copying it). I also use WhatsApp and Signal, feel free to ask me for my number if that's your favorite communication method.

I also love to send and receive postcards. If that's also your thing, don't hesitate to ask me for my mailing address ♥