A privacy‐preserving method for publishing data with multiple sensitive attributes

Abstract

Abstract The overgeneralisation may happen because most studies on data publishing for multiple sensitive attributes (SAs) have not considered the personalised privacy requirement. Furthermore, sensitive information disclosure may also be caused by these personalised requirements. To address the matter, this article develops a personalised data publishing method for multiple SAs. According to the requirements of individuals, the new method partitions SAs values into two categories: private values and public values, and breaks the association between them for privacy guarantees. For the private values, this paper takes the process of anonymisation, while the public values are released without this process. An algorithm is designed to achieve the privacy mode, where the selectivity is determined by the sensitive value frequency and undesirable objects. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide more information utility when compared with previous methods. The theoretic analyses and experiments also indicate that the privacy can be guaranteed even though the public values are known to an adversary. The overgeneralisation and privacy breach caused by the personalised requirement can be avoided by the new method.

Keywords

• data privacy
• data publishing