Parallel privacy preservation through partitioning (P4): a scalable data anonymization algorithm for health data

Abstract Background Sharing health data holds great potential for advancing medical research but also poses many challenges, including the need to protect people’s privacy. One approach to address this is data anonymization, which refers to the process of altering or transforming a dataset to preserve the privacy of the individuals contributing data. To this, privacy models have been designed to measure risks and optimization algorithms can be used to transform data to achieve a good balance between risks reduction and the preservation of the dataset’s utility. However, this process is computationally complex and challenging to apply to large datasets. Previously suggested parallel algorithms have been tailored to specific risk models, utility models and transformation methods. Methods We present a novel parallel algorithm that supports a wide range of methods for measuring risks, optimizing utility and transforming data. The algorithm trades data utility for parallelization, by anonymizing partitions of the dataset in parallel. To ensure the correctness of the anonymization process, the algorithm carefully controls the process and if needed rearranges partitions and performs additional transformations. Results We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through an open-source implementation. Our experiments show that our approach can reduce execution times by up to one order of magnitude with minor impacts on output data utility in a wide range of scenarios. Conclusions Our novel P4 algorithm for parallel and distributed data anonymization is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to systematically support a wide variety of privacy, transformation and utility models.