Capturing data usefulness and privacy protection in K-anonymisation

Abstract

K-anonymisation is an approach to protecting privacy contained within a data set. A good k-anonymisation algorithm should anonymise a data set in such a way that private information contained within it is hidden, yet anonymised data is still useful in intended applications. Maximising both data usefulness and privacy protection in k-anonymisation is however difficult. In this paper, we suggest a metric that attempts to quantify these two properties and introduce a clustering based algorithm that can achieve a balance between them in k-anonymisation.