  Ensuring the usefulness of electronic data sources while providing necessary
privacy guarantees is an important unsolved problem. This problem drives the
need for an overarching analytical framework that can quantify the safety of
personally identifiable information (privacy) while still providing a
quantifable benefit (utility) to multiple legitimate information consumers.
State of the art approaches have predominantly focused on privacy. This paper
presents the first information-theoretic approach that promises an analytical
model guaranteeing tight bounds of how much utility is possible for a given
level of privacy and vice-versa.
