Theory of k-anonymity relating to data sets

In 1997, Sweeney conducted her first re-identification experiment wherein she successfully identified the then Governor of Massachusetts, Bill Weld, to his medical records using publicly accessible records. Her results had a significant impact on privacy centered policy making including the health privacy legislation Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). However publication of the experiment was rejected twenty times. The several re-identification experiments she conducted after this were met with serious publication challenges as well. In 1998 Sweeney and her colleague Pierangela Samarati introduced k-anonymity, as it relates to a property possessed by certain anonymized data. A release of data is said to have the k-anonymity property if the information for each person contained in the release cannot be distinguished from at least k - 1 individuals whose information also appear in the release. In that same year Sweeney published a now famous example about data de-anonymization, demonstrating that a medical dataset that was in the public domain, can be used to identify individuals, regardless the removal of all explicit identifiers, when the medical dataset was combined with a public voter list. Sweeney found that 87% of the US population in a censorship dataset, can be identified by combining data attributes which are known as quasi-identifiers.

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Category:
Computer Science - Data Privacy

Completion Status:
yes

Patent Number:
N/A

Co-Inventor:
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