His research focuses on the scientific foundations of security and privacy. Datta's work contributed towards creating a computational basis for the research area of Privacy through Accountability. Specific foundational contributions include a formalization of privacy as contextual integrity, a formalization of purpose restrictions on information use, and a suite of accountability mechanisms for privacy protection. His research group produced the first complete logical specification and audit of all disclosure-related clauses of the HIPAA Privacy Rule for healthcare privacy. His group's work with Microsoft Research produced the first automated privacy compliance analysis of the production code of an Internet-scale system -- the big data analytics pipeline for Bing, Microsoft's search engine.