Data Group Anonymity: General Approach

Abstract: In the recent time, the problem of protecting privacy in statistical data before they are published has become a pressing one. Many reliable studies have been accomplished, and loads of solutions have been proposed. Though, all these researches take into consideration only the problem of protecting individual privacy, i.e., privacy of a single person, household, etc. In our previous articles, we addressed a completely new type of anonymity problems. We introduced a novel kind of anonymity to achieve in statistical data and called it group anonymity. In this paper, we aim at summarizing and generalizing our previous results, propose a complete mathematical description of how to provide group anonymity, and illustrate it with a couple of real-life examples.