On method-specific record linkage for risk assessment

Abstract

Nowadays, the need for privacy motivates the use of methods that permit us to protect a microdata file both minimizing the disclosure risk and preserving the statistical utility. Nevertheless, research is usually focused on how data utility is preserved, and much less research effort is dedicated to the study of the tools that an intruder might use to compromise the privacy of the data or, in other words, to increase the disclosure risk. Record linkage is a standard mechanism used to measure the disclosure risk of a microdata protection method. In this paper we present some improvements for the (standard) distance based record linkage. In particular, we test our improvements to evaluate the disclosure risk of rank swapping, which is higher than what was believed up to now. We will also present the results of the application of this approach to microaggregation.