Some Basics on Privacy Techniques, Anonymization and their Big Data Challenges

With the progress in the information and communication fields, new opportunities and technologies for statistical analysis, knowledge discovery, data mining, and many other research areas have emerged, together with new challenges for privacy and data protection. Nowadays several personal records are kept in computerized databases. Personal data is collected and kept in census databases, medical databases, employee databases, among others. There has always been an asymmetry between the benefits of computerized databases and the rights of individual data subjects. Some data protection principles can be derived from the legal framework. In this survey, we present some basic cryptographic and non-cryptographic techniques that may be used for enhancing privacy, we focus mainly on anonymization in databases and networks, discuss some differences and interactions among the well-known models of k -anonymity and differential privacy and finally present some challenges to privacy that come from big data analytics.