Limiting Attribute Disclosure in Randomization Based Microdata Release

Abstract

Privacy preserving microdata publication has received wide attention. In this paper, we investigate the randomization approach and focus on attribute disclosure under linking attacks. We give efficient solutions to determine optimal distortion parameters, such that we can maximize utility preservation while still satisfying privacy requirements. We compare our randomization approach with l-diversity and anatomy in terms of utility preservation (under the same privacy requirements) from three aspects (reconstructed distributions, accuracy of answering queries, and preservation of correlations). Our empirical results show that randomization incurs significantly smaller utility loss.