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In recent years, significant advances in data collection and data-storage technologies have provided the means for inexpensive storage of the huge volume of transactional data in data warehouses that reside in governments, corporations and non-profit organizations. Apart from the benefit of using this data for transaction processing, mining of these databases with the existing data mining tools can reveal hidden, novel, and valuable knowledge. The extracted knowledge patterns can offer insight to the data holders as well as be valuable in important jobs, such as decision making and strategic preparation. Moreover, companies are often willing to cooperate with other entities who conduct similar business, towards the mutual benefit of their businesses. Successful collaboration can bring products to market more rapidly, reduce fabrication and logistics costs and increases sales (Corsten & Danie, 2005). Significant knowledge patterns can be derived and shared among the partners through mutual mining of their databases. Consider the business world as an example to discover the benefits of data sharing. As a case, we present the Wal-Mart and P&G’s story (Grean & Shaw, 2002). Wal-Mart is a major retailer in the US and P&G is an international manufacturer. The two companies agreed in 1988 to share information and knowledge across their mutual supply chains in order to organize their activities in a more serious manner. The partnership of the two companies resulted in the betterment of their business relationship and reduced the associated prices. This resulted in a sharp increase in the joint sales of the two companies. By 1990, the two companies had achieved to significantly improve their everyday business towards their mutual profitability. The vast amount of customer data owned by Wal-Mart is shared to establish more business collaborations with external partners in less time. Wal-Mart continued to share portions of its consumer sales data with larger Market research companies. Strategic sales information about Wal-Mart was used in the research and industry-wide reports were broadly spread, even to the company’s business competitors. The business managers of Wal-Mart soon identified that the dissemination of customer sales data to their partners lead to leakage of their business strategic knowledge to its business competitors, proving that this business strategy of sharing the data as a bad idea (Heun, 2001).
It becomes apparent from the previous discussion that there exists an expanded circle of application scenarios in which collected data or knowledge patterns extracted from the data have to be shared with other entities, which are not trusted, to serve owner specific or organization specific purposes. The sharing of data and/or knowledge may come at a cost of privacy. If the data was related to business or organization's information, then disclosure of this data or any knowledge extracted from the data may potentially reveal sensitive trade secrets, whose knowledge can provide a significant advantage to business competitors and thus can cause the data owner to lose business over his or her peers. Intelligent analysis of data through inference based attacks, may uncover the sensitive patterns of the persons who are not trusted. This can be primarily achieved by utilizing external and publicly available sources of information in conjunction with the published data or knowledge to re-identify individuals or reveal hidden knowledge patterns (Farkas & Jajodia,2002; Morgenstern, 1988). Therefore, compliance with privacy regulations requires the incorporation of sophisticated and refined privacy preserving methodologies.