Databases and Information Systems Commons^™

K-Anonymity In The Presence Of External Databases, Dimitris Sacharidis, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Dimitris Papadias

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

The concept of k-anonymity has received considerable attention due to the need of several organizations to release microdata without revealing the identity of individuals. Although all previous k-anonymity techniques assume the existence of a public database (PD) that can be used to breach privacy, none utilizes PD during the anonymization process. Specifically, existing generalization algorithms create anonymous tables using only the microdata table (MT) to be published, independently of the external knowledge available. This omission leads to high information loss. Motivated by this observation we first introduce the concept of k-join-anonymity (KJA), which permits more effective generalization to reduce the …