Anonymity-driven Measures for Privacy

Abstract

In today’s world, digital data are enormous due to technologies that advance data collection, storage, and analyses. As more data are shared or publicly available, privacy is of great concern. Having privacy means having control over your data. The first step towards privacy protection is to understand various aspects of privacy and have the ability to quantify them. Much work in structured data, however, has focused on approaches to transforming the original data into a more anonymous form (via generalization and suppression) while preserving the data integrity. Such anonymization techniques count data instances of each set of distinct attribute values of interest to signify the required anonymity to protect an individual’s identity or confidential data. While this serves the purpose, our research takes an alternative approach to provide quick privacy measures by way of anonymity especially when dealing with large-scale data. This paper presents a study of anonymity measures based on their relevant properties that impact privacy. Specifically, we identify three properties: uniformity, variety, and diversity, and formulate their measures. The paper provides illustrated examples to evaluate their validity and discusses the use of multi-aspects of anonymity and privacy measures.