Summary

Privacy in statistical databases is a discipline whose purpose is to provide solutions to the tension between the increasing social, political and economical demand of accurate information, and the legal and ethical obligation to protect the privacy of the various parties involved. Those parties are the respondents (the individuals and enterprises to which the database records refer), the data owners (those organizations spending money in data collection) and the users (the ones querying the database, who would like their queries to stay con'd- tial). Beyond law and ethics, there are also practical reasons for data collecting agencies to invest in respondent privacy: if individual respondents feel their p- vacyguaranteed,they arelikelyto providemoreaccurateresponses. Data owner privacy is primarily motivated by practical considerations: if an enterprise c- lects data at its own expense, it may wish to minimize leakage of those data to other enterprises (even to those with whom joint data exploitation is planned). Finally, user privacy results in increased user satisfaction, even if it may curtail the ability of the database owner to pro'le users. Thereareatleasttwotraditionsinstatisticaldatabaseprivacy,bothofwhich started in the 1970s: one stems from o'cial statistics, where the discipline is also known as statistical disclosure control (SDC), and the other originatesfrom computer science and database technology. In o'cial statistics, the basic c- cern is respondent privacy.