Anatomy: simple and effective privacy preservation

This paper presents a novel technique, anatomy, for publishing sensitive data. Anatomy releases all the quasi-identifier and sensitive values directly in two separate tables. Combined with a grouping mechanism, this approach protects privacy, and captures a large amount of correlation in the microdata. We develop a linear-time algorithm for computing anatomized tables that obey the l-diversity privacy requirement, and minimize the error of reconstructing the microdata. Extensive experiments confirm that our technique allows significantly more effective data analysis than the conventional publication method based on generalization. Specifically, anatomy permits aggregate reasoning with average error below 10%, which is lower than the error obtained from a generalized table by orders of magnitude.