Title
Disambiguation data: extracting information from anonymized sources.
Abstract
Privacy protection is an important consideration when releasing medical databases to the research community. We show that while recent advances in anonymization algorithms provide increased levels of protection, it is still possible to calculate approximations to the original data set. In some cases, one can even uniquely reconstruct entries in a table before anonymization. In this paper, we demonstrate how knowledge of an anonymization algorithm based on ambiguating data cell entries can be used to undo the anonymization process. We investigate the effect of this algorithm and its reversal on data sets of varying sizes and distributions. It is shown that by using a computationally complex disambiguation process, information on individuals can be extracted from an anonymized data set.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1197/jamia.M1240
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL INFORMATICS ASSOCIATION
Keywords
DocType
Volume
algorithms,privacy,demography,confidentiality
Journal
9.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
SUP6.0
1067-5027
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.42
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stephan Dreiseitl133834.80
Staal Vinterbo236132.66
Lucila Ohno-Machado31426187.95