True spatial k-anonymity: adaptive areal elimination vs. adaptive areal masking
Laure Charleux, Katherine Schofield · Cartography and Geographic Information Science · 2020
Spatial anonymization of address points is critical to fields such as public health. There have been recent concerns about applications of geomasks that did not guarantee the level of k-anonymity theoretically expected. An analysis of the problem and a potential solution were previously proposed: Adaptive Areal Elimination (AAE). The present paper expands on AAE and proposes a modified version, Adaptive Areal Masking (AAM). A benchmark comparison of both methods is conducted, which shows that AAM outperforms AAE in most configurations tested. The discussion attempts to identify the application cases for which AAE might still be preferable and addresses documentation needs with both methods.