Measuring Privacy: A Risk-Based Approach

Jan 14, 2009

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Abstract

There have been significant research developments in technology to protect privacy. Unfortunately, few of these have made the transition to practice. A large part of the problem is the lack of an accepted way to measure privacy. Legal and regulatory terms do not translate well into technological solutions, and the plethora of technical approaches do not seem to resonate with privacy advocates.

This talk will discuss issues and challenges, with examples of the reason why a clear standard is difficult. A risk-based approach will be presented that allows anonymization based on controlling the potential damage from disclosure. This approach will be compared with more traditional anonymization measures, showing the difficulty of measuring
the potential for harm from those measures.

This represents joint work with Mehmet Ercan Nergiz (Purdue University) and Maurizio Atzori (University of Pisa).