Disclosure risk measures for microdata

Abstract

We define several disclosure risk measures for microdata. We analyze disclosure risk based on the disclosure control techniques applied to initial microdata. 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 given form of disclosure will occur if a masked microdataset is released. Microdata represents a series of records, each record containing information on an individual unit. The disclosure risk measures presented in the paper are validated in our experiments.