Information Theory and Privacy in Data Banks.

I. S. Reed

Expert InsightsPublished 1973

The problem of providing privacy transformations for databanks and retrieval systems falls into two modern disciplines: information theory and computer science. In this paper the concern is primarily with the former. Here it is shown that measures of privacy can be drawn from information theory and, in particular, from rate distortion theory. It is demonstrated that a rate distortion function or the minimum mutual information about a record, conveyed by a distorted version of the record, is a natural measure of privacy. Shannon's conditions for perfect secrecy are met if the average mutual information about an original record R, given a distorted version E, is zero. 27 pp. Ref.

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  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 1973
  • Pages: 27
  • Document Number: P-4952

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Reed, I. S., Information Theory and Privacy in Data Banks. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1973. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4952.html.
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