Privacy in statistical databases is about finding tradeoffs to the tension between the increasing societal and economical demand for accurate information and the legal and ethical obligation to protect the privacy of individuals and enterprises which are the respondents providing the statistical data. The motivation for respondent privacy is one of survival for statistical databases: statistical agencies or survey institutes cannot expect to collect accurate information from individual or corporate respondents unless these feel the privacy of their responses is guaranteed.

Beyond respondent privacy, there are two additional privacy dimensions to be considered: privacy for the data owners (organizations owning or gathering the database, who wouldn't like to share the data they have collected at great expense) and privacy for the users (those who submit queries to the database and would like
their analyses to stay private).

"Privacy in Statistical Databases 2008" (PSD 2008) is a conference sponsored and organized by the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy and the CONSOLIDER ARES project, with proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. It purpose is to gather world-wide, high-level research in statistical database privacy.

PSD 2008 is a successor to PSD 2006 (Rome, Dec. 13-15, 2006) and PSD 2004 (Barcelona, June 9-11, 2004), both with proceedings published by Springer in LNCS 4302 and LNCS 3050, respectively. Those three PSD conferences follow a tradition of high-quality technical conferences on SDC which started with "Statistical Data Protection-SDP'98", held in Lisbon in 1998 and with proceedings published by OPOCE, and continued with the AMRADS project SDC Workshop, held in Luxemburg in 2001 and with proceedings published in Springer LNCS vol. 2316.

Like the aforementioned preceding conferences, PSD 2008 originates in Europe, but wishes to stay a worldwide event in database privacy and SDC. Thus, contributions and attendees from overseas are welcome.