Tuning anonymity level for assuring high data quality: an empirical study.

Preserving data privacy is posing new challenges to software engineering researchers. Current technologies can be too cumbersome, pervasive or costly to be successfully applied in dynamic and complex scenarios where data exchange occurs among a large number of applications. Anonymization techniques seem to be a promising candidate, even if preliminary investigations suggest that they could deteriorate the quality of data. An empirical study has been carried out in order to understand the relationship between the anonymization level and the degradation of data quality.