Disclosure Risk and Disclosure Avoidance for Microdata
Under given concrete exogenous conditions, the fraction of identifiable records in a microdata file without positive identifiers such as name and address is estimated. The effect of possible noise in the data, as well as the sample property of microdata files, is taken into account. Using real microdata files, it is shown that there is no risk of disclosure if the information content of characteristics known to the investigator (additional knowledge) is limited. Files with…