Managing Information Leakage

We explore the problem of managing information leakage by connecting two hitherto disconnected topics: entity resolution (ER) and data privacy (DP). As more of our sensitive data gets exposed to a variety of merchants, health care providers, employers, social sites and so on, there is a higher chance that an adversary can “connect the dots” and piece together our information, leading to even more loss of privacy. For instance, suppose that Alice has a social networking profile with her name and photo and a web homepage containing her name and address. An adversary Eve may be able to link the profile and homepage to connect the photo and address of Alice and thus glean more personal information. The better Eve is at linking the information, the more vulnerable is Alice’s privacy. Thus in order to gain DP, one must try to prevent important bits of information being resolved by ER. In this paper, we formalize information leakage and list several challenges both in ER and DP. We also propose using disinformation as a tool for containing information leakage.