Anonymizing Unstructured Data

In this paper we consider the problem of anonymizing datasets in which each individual is associated with a set of items that constitute private information about the individual. Illustrative datasets include market-basket datasets and search engine query logs. We formalize the notion of k-anonymity for set-valued data as a variant of the k-anonymity model for traditional relational datasets. We define an optimization problem that arises from this definition of anonymity and provide a constant factor approximation algorithm for the same. We evaluate our algorithms on the America Online query log dataset.