A public-use microdata file should be analytically valid. For a very small number of uses, the microdata should yield analytic results that are approximately the same as the original, confidential file that is not distributed. If the microdata file contains a moderate number of variables and is required to meet a single set of analytic needs of, say, university researchers, then many more recor...

Disclosure Control is the discipline concerned with the modification of data containing confidential information about individual entities, such as persons, households, businesses, etc. in order to prevent third parties working with these data from recognizing entities in the data and thereby disclosing information about these entities. In very broad terms, disclosure risk is the risk that a gi...

A breakthrough in the tradeoff between privacy and data quality has been achieved for restricted access to population census microdata samples. The IPUMS-International website, as of June 2006, offers integrated microdata for 47 censuses, totaling more than 140 million person records, with 13 countries represented. Over the next four years, the global collaboratory led by the Minnesota Populati...

The paper presents an illustration and empirical study of releasing multiply imputed, fully synthetic public use microdata. Simulations based on data from the US Current Population Survey are used to evaluate the potential validity of inferences based on fully synthetic data for a variety of descriptive and analytic estimands, to assess the degree of protection of confidentiality that is afford...

The anonymization of sensitive microdata (e.g. medical health records) is a widely-studied topic in the research community. A still unsolved problem is the limited informative value of anonymized microdata that often rules out further processing (e.g. statistical analysis). Thus, a tradeoff between anonymity and data precision has to be made, resulting in the release of partially anonymized mic...

This paper proposes a tool to automatically enrich webpages with semantic information by annotating keywords in the document with microdata markup. There are two case studies described and implemented in this paper. The first case study focuses on generating new webpages with microdata and the second case study focuses on enriching existing webpages with microdata. This paper also demonstrates ...

This paper focuses on a combination of two disclosure limitation techniques, additive noise and multiplicative bias, and studies their efficacy in protecting confidentiality of continuous microdata. A Bayesian intruder model is extensively simulated in order to assess the performance of these disclosure limitation techniques as a function of key parameters like the variability amongst profiles ...

Census microdata are ideal for developing statistical literacy of university students. Access, particularly to internationally comparable microdata, has been a significant obstacle. The IPUMS-International project offers a uniform solution to providing access for policy analysts, researchers, and students to integrated microdata and metadata, while protecting statistical confidentiality. Eighty...

Continuous variables in microdata can be masked for protection from disclosure through the use of an additive noise. I consider adding noise that is distributed according to a mixture of normal distributions. There are several parameters involved in constructing the additive noise. The study’s purpose is to lay down as a guide a recipe for the choices of these parameters. The proportion of reid...