A Critique of k-Anonymity and Some of Its Enhancements

Abstract

k-Anonymity is a privacy property requiring that all combinations of key attributes in a database be repeated at least for k records. It has been shown that k-anonymity alone does not always ensure privacy. A number of sophistications of k-anonymity have been proposed, like p-sensitive k-anonymity, l-diversity and t-closeness. This paper explores the shortcomings of those properties, none of which turns out to be completely convincing.