Data Privacy

Abstract

In this chapter we present an overview of the topic data privacy. We review privacy models and measures of disclosure risk. These models and measures provide computational definitions of what privacy means, and of how to evaluate the privacy level of a data set. Then, we give a summary of data protection mechanisms. We provide a classification of these methods according to three dimensions: whose privacy is being sought, the computations to be done, and the number of data sources. Finally, we describe masking methods. Such methods are the data protection mechanisms used for databases when the data use is undefined and the protected database is required to be useful for several data uses. We also provide a definition of information loss (or data utility) for this type of data protection mechanism. The chapter finishes with a summary.