PRIVATEER: A Private Record Linkage Toolkit

Privacy preserving record linkage (PPRL) is the process of integrating data across multiple heterogeneous data sources without compromising their privacy. While many techniques have been developed for PPRL, there has not been, up to now, a universally accepted method providing both performance and quality of results in all cases. To this end, we present PRIVATEER, a toolkit which aims at enabling practitioners to compare various techniques involved in the PPRL process and determine the best for their needs. The toolkit is based on a simulator, designed to be highly configurable, modular and extensible, allowing the user to test different configurations by combining a number of privacy preserving blocking and matching methods with corresponding distance and similarity measures on her own or sample data. We showcase the usability of our toolkit by presenting experimental results measuring both quality and performance of state-of-the-art PPRL methods.