Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, John Abowd, Lars Vilhuber. "Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map.". International Conference on Data Engineering, Cornell University Comuputer Science Department, Cornell, USA, 10, April, 2008.

Abstract
Abstract— In this paper, we propose the first formal privacy analysis of a data anonymization process known as the synthetic data generation, a technique becoming popular in the statistics community. The target application for this work is a mapping program that shows the commuting patterns of the population of the United States. The source data for this application were collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, but due to privacy constraints,they cannot be used directly by the mapping program. Instead, we generate synthetic data that statistically mimic the original data while providing privacy guarantees. We use these synthetic data as a surrogate for the original data. We find that while some existing definitions of privacy are inapplicable to our target application, others are too conservative and render the synthetic data useless since they guard against privacy breaches that are very unlikely. Moreover, the data in our target application is sparse, and none of the existing solutions are tailored to anonymize sparse data. In this paper, we propose solutions to address the above issues.

Electronic downloads

• icde2008-privacy.pdf · application/pdf · 201 kbytes

• HTML

  Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, John
  Abowd, Lars Vilhuber. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/463.html"
  >Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map.</a>,
  International Conference on Data Engineering, Cornell
  University Comuputer Science Department, Cornell, USA, 10,
  April, 2008.

• Plain text

  Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, John
  Abowd, Lars Vilhuber. "Privacy: Theory meets Practice
  on the Map.". International Conference on Data
  Engineering, Cornell University Comuputer Science
  Department, Cornell, USA, 10, April, 2008.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{GehrkeKiferMachanavajjhalaAbowdVilhuber08_PrivacyTheoryMeetsPracticeOnMap,
      author = {Johannes Gehrke and Daniel Kifer and Ashwin
                Machanavajjhala and John Abowd and Lars Vilhuber},
      title = {Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map.},
      booktitle = {International Conference on Data Engineering},
      organization = {Cornell University Comuputer Science Department,
                Cornell, USA},
      pages = {10},
      month = {April},
      year = {2008},
      abstract = {Abstract— In this paper, we propose the first
                formal privacy analysis of a data anonymization
                process known as the synthetic data generation, a
                technique becoming popular in the statistics
                community. The target application for this work is
                a mapping program that shows the commuting
                patterns of the population of the United States.
                The source data for this application were
                collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, but due to
                privacy constraints,they cannot be used directly
                by the mapping program. Instead, we generate
                synthetic data that statistically mimic the
                original data while providing privacy guarantees.
                We use these synthetic data as a surrogate for the
                original data. We find that while some existing
                definitions of privacy are inapplicable to our
                target application, others are too conservative
                and render the synthetic data useless since they
                guard against privacy breaches that are very
                unlikely. Moreover, the data in our target
                application is sparse, and none of the existing
                solutions are tailored to anonymize sparse data.
                In this paper, we propose solutions to address the
                above issues.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/463.html}
  }
  

Posted by Johannes Gehrke on 26 Aug 2008.
Groups: trust
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