  It is obligatory that organizations by law safeguard the privacy of
individuals when handling data sets containing personal identifiable
information (PII). Nevertheless, during the process of data privatization, the
utility or usefulness of the privatized data diminishes. Yet achieving the
optimal balance between data privacy and utility needs has been documented as
an NP-hard challenge. In this study, we investigate data privacy and utility
preservation using KNN machine learning classification as a gauge.
