26-01-2012, 12:43 PM
PRIVACY PRESERVING DATA PUBLISHING
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INTRODUCTION
The collection of digital information by governments, corporations, and individuals has created tremendous opportunities for knowledge-based decision making. Driven by mutual benefits, or by regulations that require certain data to be published, there is a demand for the exchange and publication of data among various parties. Detailed person-specific data in its original form often contains sensitive information about individuals, and publishing such data immediately violates individual privacy.
Micro data Publishing
GOVERNMENT agencies and other organizations often need to publish micro data, e.g., medical data or census data, for research and other purposes. While the released table gives useful information to researchers, it presents disclosure risk to the individuals whose data are in the table. Therefore, objective is to limit the disclosure risk to an acceptable level while maximizing the benefit.
Quasi-Identifier.
Quasi-identifiers are attributes whose values when taken together can potentially identify an individual. Examples include Zip-code, Birth date, and Gender. An adversary may already know the QI values of some individuals in the data. This knowledge can be either from personal contact or from other publicly available databases (e.g., a voter registration list) that include both explicit identifiers and quasi-identifiers.
Sensitive Attribute.
Sensitive attributes are attributes whose values should not be associated with an individual by the adversary. Examples include Disease and Salary. An example of micro data table is shown in Table 1.1. As in most previous work, we assume that each attribute in the micro data is associated with one of the above three attribute types and attribute types can be specified by the data publisher.
