Applicability of Confidentiality Methods to Personal and Business Data

Abstract

National Statistical Agencies and other data custodians have a responsibility to protect the confidentiality of commercially sensitive business data as well as personally private social and survey data. However, traditional confidentiality methods have generally been developed for the context of social or survey data about individual persons. Several recent studies have highlighted that such traditional confidentiality measures may not be directly applicable to business data, due to the different characteristics of business data and personal data. In this paper we provide a discussion of these recent studies and their conclusions. We find that while the confidentiality objective is the same for business data and social and survey data, the disclosure scenarios and disclosure risks are different. There is evidence that business data and social and survey data may require different confidentiality protection methods to achieve an effective balance between disclosure risk and data utility.