Privacy and Anonymity in Information Management Systems

Beschreibung

The development of information technologies in the last few years has been remarkable. Large amounts of data are collected and stored by both public institutions and private companies every day. There are clear threats to the privacy of citizens if no care is taken when collecting, storing and disseminating data. Ensuring privacy for individuals in a society when dealing with digital information, is a task which involves many agents, including politicians, legal authorities, managers, developers, and system administrators. Privacy and Anonymity in Information Management Systems deals with the more technical parts of this `privacy cycle', those issues that are mostly related to computer science, and discusses the process by which different privacy mechanisms are motivated, designed, analyzed, tested and finally implemented in companies or institutions. The book is written in such a way that several of the chapters are self-contained and accessible to students, covering topics such as the problem of Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC), i.e. how to modify datasets that contain statistical information before publicly releasing them, and doing so in such a way that the privacy of the confidential original information is preserved; and specific distributed applications involving privacy – how different agents have private inputs but want to cooperate to run some protocol in their own interest, without revealing unnecessary parts of their private inputs. Graduate students and researchers will find this book an excellent resource.
As depicted in David Lodge’s celebrated novel Small World, the perceived size of our world experienced a progressive decrease as jet airplanes became affordable to ever greater shares of the earth’s population. Yet, the really dramatic shrinking had to wait until the mid-1990s, when Internet became widespread and the information age stopped being an empty buzzword. But small is not necessarily beautiful. We now live in a global village and, alas, some (often very powerful) voices state that we ought not expect any more privacy in it. Should this be true, we would have created our own nightmare: a global village combining the worst of conventional villages, where a lot of information on an individual is known by the other villagers, and conventional big cities, where the invidual feels lost in a grim and potentially dangerous place. Whereas security is essential for organizations to survive, individuals and so- times even companies also need some privacy to develop comfortably and lead a free life. This is the reason why individual privacy is mentioned in the Univ- sal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and data privacy is protected by law in most Western countries. Indeed, without privacy, the rest of fundamental rights, like freedom of speech and democracy, are impaired. The outstanding challenge is to create technology that implements those legal guarantees in a way compatible with functionality and security. This book edited by Dr. Javier Herranz and Dr.
A snapshot of the research that privacy researchers are currently carrying out A book that can be considered as an actual baseline of privacy and anonymity research The different profiles of the two editors bring the areas of theoretical cryptography and privacy in real life closer A combination of theory and practice; that wills erve as a bridge between rsearchers in cryptography and researchers in other, more aplied, topics such as statistical/medical databases

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Jordi Nin

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Anonymous data access control computational security networks privacy social networks statistical databases

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From the reviews:

“This collection of nine inviting chapters discusses current materials concerned with privacy-preserving data management, statistical disclosure control (how to generate statistics without identifying individuals), and application privacy in actions such as data mining and social networks. Advanced students, data managers, privacy experts, and computer scientists will generally find something useful in these materials. … this collection does provide a useful introduction to this important topic.” (Brad Reid, ACM Computing Reviews, May, 2011)

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