Governmental, public, and private organizations are more and more frequently required to make data available for external release in a selective and secure fashion. Most data are today released in the form of microdata, reporting information on individual respondents. The protection of microdata against improper disclosure is therefore an issue that has become increasingly important and will co...

In the modern digital society, personal information about individuals can be collected, stored, shared, and disseminated much more easily and freely. Such data can be released in macrodata form, reporting aggregated information, or in microdata form, reporting specific information on individual respondent. Protecting data against improper disclosure is then becoming critical to ensure proper pr...

Data protection specialists need flexible software tools for the exploratory use of protection methods to generate high quality confidential data. Microdata protection is widely used and is often the only possible way to provide data to both researchers and users. In this paper we present a methodological and computational framework for the generation of anonymised microdata and give insights t...

Data protection specialists need flexible software tools for the exploratory use of protection methods to generate high quality confidential data. Microdata protection is widely used and is often the only possible way to provide data to both researchers and users. In this paper we present a methodological and computational framework for the generation of anonymised microdata and give insights t...

In this work we describe a microdata protection method based on the use of fuzzy clustering and, more specifically, using fuzzy c-means. Microaggregation is a well-known masking method for microdata protection used by National Statistical Offices. Given a set of objects described in terms of a set of variables, this method consists on building a partition of the objects and then replace the ori...

Statistical agencies release sample microdata from social surveys under different modes of access ranging from Public Use Files (PUF) in the form of tables or highly perturbed datasets to Microdata Under Contract (MUC) for researchers and licensed institutions where levels of protection are less severe. In addition, statistical agencies often have on-site datalabs where registered researchers c...

Microdata protection is a hot topic in the field of Statistical Disclosure Control, which has gained special interest after the disclosure of 658000 queries by the America Online (AOL) search engine in August 2006. Many algorithms, methods and properties have been proposed to deal with microdata disclosure. One of the emerging concepts in microdata protection is kanonymity, introduced by Samara...

Microaggregation is a technique for protecting the privacy of respondents in individual data (microdata) releases. This papers starts with a survey of the general definitions and concepts related to microdata protection and then reviews the state of the art of microaggregation, to which our group has substantially contributed.

In today’s world, governmental, public, and private institutions systematically release data which describes individual entities (commonly referred as microdata). Those institutions are increasingly concerned with possible misuses of the data that might lead to disclosure of confidential information. Moreover, confidentiality regulation requires that privacy of individuals represented in the re...

Microdata protection is a hot topic in the field of Statistical Disclosure Control, which has gained special interest after the disclosure of 658000 queries by the America Online (AOL) search engine in August 2006. Many algorithms, methods and properties have been proposed to deal with microdata disclosure. One of the emerging concepts in microdata protection is k-anonymity, introduced by Samar...