Ada Wai-Chee Fu

Gaining access to high-quality data is a vital necessity in knowledge-based decision making. But data in its raw form often contains sensitive information about individuals. Providing solutions to this problem, the methods and tools of privacy-preserving data publishing enable the publication of useful information while protecting data privacy. Introduction to Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing: Concepts and Techniques presents state-of-the-art information sharing and data integration methods that take into account privacy and data mining requirements. The first part of the book discusses the fundamentals of the field. In the second part, the authors present anonymization methods for preserving information utility for specific data mining tasks. The third part examines the privacy issues, privacy models, and anonymization methods for realistic and challenging data publishing scenarios. While the first three parts focus on anonymizing relational data, the last part studies the privacy threats, privacy models, and anonymization methods for complex data, including transaction, trajectory, social network, and textual data. This book not only explores privacy and information utility issues but also efficiency and scalability challenges. In many chapters, the authors highlight efficient and scalable methods and provide an analytical discussion to compare the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions.

Gaining access to high-quality data is a vital necessity in knowledge-based decision making. But data in its raw form often contains sensitive information about individuals. Providing solutions to this problem, the methods and tools of privacy-preserving data publishing enable the publication of useful information while protecting data privacy. Introduction to Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing: Concepts and Techniques presents state-of-the-art information sharing and data integration methods that take into account privacy and data mining requirements. The first part of the book discusses the fundamentals of the field. In the second part, the authors present anonymization methods for preserving information utility for specific data mining tasks. The third part examines the privacy issues, privacy models, and anonymization methods for realistic and challenging data publishing scenarios. While the first three parts focus on anonymizing relational data, the last part studies the privacy threats, privacy models, and anonymization methods for complex data, including transaction, trajectory, social network, and textual data. This book not only explores privacy and information utility issues but also efficiency and scalability challenges. In many chapters, the authors highlight efficient and scalable methods and provide an analytical discussion to compare the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions.

Privacy preservation has become a major issue in many data analysis applications. When a data set is released to other parties for data analysis, privacy-preserving techniques are often required to reduce the possibility of identifying sensitive information about individuals. For example, in medical data, sensitive information can be the fact that a particular patient suffers from HIV. In spatial data, sensitive information can be a specific location of an individual. In web surfing data, the information that a user browses certain websites may be considered sensitive. Consider a dataset containing some sensitive information is to be released to the public. In order to protect sensitive information, the simplest solution is not to disclose the information. However, this would be an overkill since it will hinder the process of data analysis over the data from which we can find interesting patterns. Moreover, in some applications, the data must be disclosed under the government regulations. Alternatively, the data owner can first modify the data such that the modified data can guarantee privacy and, at the same time, the modified data retains sufficient utility and can be released to other parties safely. This process is usually called as privacy-preserving data publishing. In this monograph, we study how the data owner can modify the data and how the modified data can preserve privacy and protect sensitive information. Table of Contents: Introduction / Fundamental Concepts / One-Time Data Publishing / Multiple-Time Data Publishing / Graph Data / Other Data Types / Future Research Directions