Chapter 2 Database Privacy

There is a growing social and economic demand for open data to improve planning, scientific research, market research, and so on. In particular, the public sector is under pressure to release as much information as it can in the name of transparency. Organizations releasing data include national statistical institutes, healthcare authorities (epidemiology), or even private organizations (e.g., consumer surveys). When published data refer to individual respondents, care must be taken that the privacy of the latter is not violated. It should be de facto impossible to relate the published data to specific individuals. Indeed, supplying data to national statistical institutes is compulsory in most countries but, in return, those institutes commit to preserving the privacy of respondents. Hence, rather than publishing exactly accurate information for each individual, the aim should be to provide useful statistical information, that is, to preserve as much as possible in the released data the statistical properties of the original data. This is why privacy-preserving databases on individuals are called statistical databases. Statistical databases come in three main formats: