Public records on the internet: the privacy dilemma
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Computers, freedom and privacy
k-anonymity: a model for protecting privacy
International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems
Evaluating Web-Based E-Government Services with a Citizen-Centric Approach
HICSS '05 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 5 - Volume 05
M-invariance: towards privacy preserving re-publication of dynamic datasets
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map
ICDE '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering
Differential privacy: a survey of results
TAMC'08 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Theory and applications of models of computation
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Policymakers struggle to determine the proper tradeoffs between data accessibility and data-subject privacy as public records move online. For example, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania recently eliminated the ability to search the county property assessment database using property owners' names. We conducted a user study to determine whether this strategy provides effective privacy protection against a non-expert adversary. We found that removing search by name provides some increased privacy protection, because some users were unable to use other means to determine the address of an individual. However, this privacy protection is limited, and interface usability problems presented a comparable barrier. Our analysis suggests that if policymakers use removal of search by name as a privacy mechanism they should attempt to mitigate usability issues that can hinder legitimate use of public records databases.