Assessing Privacy and Risks

Abstract

An important aspect of any applications that facilitate the linking of sensitive data is their evaluation with regard to the privacy protection they provide, as well as the risks of a potential successful reidentification of sensitive information in any encoded or encrypted database used by such an application. In this chapter we discuss how to measure privacy and risks in the context of conducting privacy-preserving linking of sensitive databases, and we present the different types of attacks that potentially can be applied on encoded or encrypted databases where the aim of an adversary is to learn about the sensitive information contained in such databases. We also discuss the related topic of statistical disclosure control methods, which have been used by many national statistical institutes in the context of publishing sensitive microdata while at the same time ensuring that the release of such data protects the identity of all subjects in the released data.