Advances in Privacy Preserving Record Linkage

Abstract

However, even though many solutions have been proposed towards addressing this problem, a new side effect rises regarding the privacy of the data which usually has to be protected during linkage. Sensitive information such as names, addresses, and illnesses, especially in cases of medical data, should not be revealed without further evidence to any participant of the merging procedure. This raises the need of creating new techniques for linking data while, at the same time, the privacy of the subjects described by these data is preserved. This need led to the evolvement of a new research area called privacy preserving record linkage. This chapter will attempt to present the state of the art of the methods proposed to address the privacy preserving record linkage problem and provide a taxonomy of these techniques based on their core characteristics.