Inference control in statistical databases, also known as statistical disclosure limitation or statistical confidentiality, is about finding tradeoffs to the tension between the increasing societal need for accurate statistical data and the legal and ethical obligation to protect privacy of individuals and enterprises which are the source of data for producing statistics. Techniques used by intruders to make inferences compromising privacy increasingly draw on data mining, record linkage, knowledge discovery, and data analysis and thus statistical inference control becomes an integral part of...

Privacy in statistical databases is about ?nding tradeo's to the tension between the increasing societal and economical demand for accurate information and the legal and ethical obligation to protect the privacy of individuals and enterprises, which are the source of the statistical data. Statistical agencies cannot expect to collect accurate information from individual or corporate respondents unless these feel the privacy of their responses is guaranteed; also, recent surveys of Web users show that a majority of these are unwilling to provide data to a Web site unless they know that privacy...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Privacy in Statistical Databases, PSD 2012, held in Palermo, Italy, in September 2012 under the sponsorship of the UNESCO chair in Data Privacy. The 27 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on tabular data protection; microdata protection: methods and disclosure risk; microdata protection: case studies; spatial data protection; differential privacy; on-line databases and remote access; privacy-preserving protocols.

The current social and economic context increasingly demands open data to improve scientific research and decision making. However, when published data refer to individual respondents, disclosure risk limitation techniques must be implemented to anonymize the data and guarantee by design the fundamental right to privacy of the subjects the data refer to. Disclosure risk limitation has a long record in the statistical and computer science research communities, who have developed a variety of privacy-preserving solutions for data releases. This Synthesis Lecture provides a comprehensive...