  In this work, we focus on protection against identity disclosure in the
publication of sparse multidimensional data. Existing multidimensional
anonymization techniquesa) protect the privacy of users either by altering the
set of quasi-identifiers of the original data (e.g., by generalization or
suppression) or by adding noise (e.g., using differential privacy) and/or (b)
assume a clear distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive information and
sever the possible linkage. In many real world applications the above
techniques are not applicable. For instance, consider web search query logs.
Suppressing or generalizing anonymization methods would remove the most
valuable information in the dataset: the original query terms. Additionally,
web search query logs contain millions of query terms which cannot be
categorized as sensitive or non-sensitive since a term may be sensitive for a
user and non-sensitive for another. Motivated by this observation, we propose
an anonymization technique termed disassociation that preserves the original
terms but hides the fact that two or more different terms appear in the same
record. We protect the users' privacy by disassociating record terms that
participate in identifying combinations. This way the adversary cannot
associate with high probability a record with a rare combination of terms. To
the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first to employ such a technique
to provide protection against identity disclosure. We propose an anonymization
algorithm based on our approach and evaluate its performance on real and
synthetic datasets, comparing it against other state-of-the-art methods based
on generalization and differential privacy.
