Towards optimal sensitivity-based anonymization for big data
Mohammed Al-Zobbi, Seyed A. Shahrestani, Chun Ruan · 2017
Datasets containing private and sensitive information are useful for data analytics. Data owners cautiously release such sensitive data using privacy-preserving publishing techniques. Personal re-identification possibility is much larger than ever before. For instance, social media has dramatically increased the exposure to privacy violation. One well-known technique of k-anonymity proposes a protection approach against privacy exposure. K-anonymity tends to find k equivalent number of data records. The chosen attributes are known as Quasiidentifiers. This approach may reduce the personal reidentification. However, this may lessen the usefulness of information gained. The value of k should be carefully determined, to compromise both security and information gained. Unfortunately, there is no any standard procedure to define the value of k. The problem of the optimal k-anonymization is NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a greedy-based heuristic approach that provides an optimal value for k. The approach evaluates the empirical risk concerning our Sensitivity-Based Anonymization method. Our approach is derived from the finegrained access and business role anonymization for big data, which forms our framework.