A Novel Approach for Personalized Privacy Preserving Data Publishing with Multiple Sensitive Attributes

Abstract

The Personalized Privacy has drawn a lot of attention from diverse magnitudes of the public and various functional units like bureau of statistics, and hospitals. A large number of data publishing models and methods have been proposed and most of them focused on single sensitive attribute. A few research papers marked the need for preserving privacy of data consisting of multiple sensitive attributes. Applying the existing methods such as k-anonymity, l-diversity directly for publishing multiple sensitive attributes would minimize the utility of the data. Moreover, personalization has not been studied in this dimension. In this paper, we present a publishing model that manages personalization for publishing data with multiple sensitive attributes. The model uses slicing technique supported by deterministic anonymization for quasi identifiers; generalization for categorical sensitive attributes; and fuzzy approach for numerical sensitive attributes based on diversity. We cap the belief of an adversary inferring a sensitive value in a published data set to as high as that of an inference based on public knowledge. The experiments were carried out on census dataset and synthetic datasets. The results ensure that the privacy is being safeguarded without any compromise on the utility of the data.