Priority-Based k-Anonymity Accomplished by Weighted Generalisation Structures

Abstract. Biobanks are gaining in importance by storing large collections of patient's clinical data (e.g. disease history, laboratory parameters, diagnosis, life style) together with biological materials such as tissue samples, blood or other body fluids. When releasing these patientspecific data for medical studies privacy protection has to be guaranteed for ethical and legal reasons. k-anonymity may be used to ensure privacy by generalising and suppressing attributes in order to release sufficient data twins that mask patients' identities. However, data transformation techniques like generalisation may produce anonymised data unusable for medical studies because some attributes become too coarse-grained. We propose a priority-driven anonymisation technique that allows to specify the degree of acceptable information loss for each attribute separately. We use generalisation and suppression of attributes together with a weighting-scheme for quantifying generalisation steps. O...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAWAK
• Authors: Konrad Stark, Johann Eder, Kurt Zatloukal
• Keywords: Anonymisation, Anonymisation Technique, DAWAK 2006, Generalisation, Information Management