Anonymity and Disclosure Control for Network Data
Conference
65th ISI World Statistics Congress 2025
Format: IPS Abstract - WSC 2025
Keywords: privacy
Session: IPS 900 - Network Science for Official Statistics
Monday 6 October 2 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. (Europe/Amsterdam)
Abstract
Population-scale networks offer unique opportunities to enhance our understanding of the structure of our society and economy. It is therefore desirable to make such network data accessible to researchers or the public. However, an attacker with access to limited structural information surrounding a target node may be capable of re-identifying population units or some of their properties. In this talk we discuss how de-anonymizing network structure can be, by introducing new measures of k-anonymity that rely on local network structure surrounding a node. Based both on theory and numerical experiments we point out just how revealing network structure can be.
Figures/Tables
Four approaches for assessing node anonymity.
