Hiding the presence of individuals from shared databases

  • Authors:
  • Mehmet Ercan Nergiz;Maurizio Atzori;Chris Clifton

  • Affiliations:
  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN;ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Advances in information technology, and its use in research, are increasing both the need for anonymized data and the risks of poor anonymization. We present a metric, δ-presence, that clearly links the quality of anonymization to the risk posed by inadequate anonymization. We show that existing anonymization techniques are inappropriate for situations where δ-presence is a good metric (specifically, where knowing an individual is in the database poses a privacy risk), and present algorithms for effectively anonymizing to meet δ-presence. The algorithms are evaluated in the context of a real-world scenario, demonstrating practical applicability of the approach.