Uncertainty Can Decrease Privacy: an observation

In many application areas, e.g., in medical applications, it is important to be able to get statistical information about the data without disclosing individual cases. One of the methods to preserve privacy in such statistical databases is to introduce uncertainty, i.e., to replace the exact values with intervals of possible values. In this talk, we show that while the introduction of uncertainty can often enhance privacy, sometimes, the opposite effect occurs: adding uncertainty can decrease privacy. Keywords— Fuzzy uncertainty, interval uncertainty, privacy, statistical databases