The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
L-diversity: privacy beyond k-anonymity
Abstract
Publishing data about individuals without revealing sensitive information about them is an important problem. In recent years, a new definition of privacy called \kappa-anonymity has gained popularity. In a \kappa-anonymized dataset, each record is indistinguishable from at least k—1 other records with respect to certain "identifying" attributes. In this paper we show with two simple attacks that a \kappa-anonymized dataset has some subtle, but severe privacy problems. First, we show that an attacker can discover the values of sensitive attributes when there is little diversity in those sensitive attributes. Second, attackers often have background knowledge, and we show that \kappa-anonymity does not guarantee privacy against attackers using background knowledge. We give a detailed analysis of these two attacks and we propose a novel and powerful privacy definition called \ell-diversity. In addition to building a formal foundation for \ell-diversity, we show in an experimental evaluation that \ell-diversity is practical and can be implemented efficiently.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
k-ANONYMITY: A MODEL FOR PROTECTING PRIVACY
SWEENEY, L. (2002) · International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems · doi:10.1142/s0218488502001648 · Cited by 8,571
L -diversity: Privacy beyond k -anonymity
Machanavajjhala, A., Kifer, D., Gehrke, J., & Venkitasubramaniam, M. (2007) · ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data · doi:10.1145/1217299.1217302 · Cited by 3,617
Self-citationGoldreich, O., Micali, S., & Wigderson, A. (1987) · Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM conference on Theory of computing - STOC '87 · doi:10.1145/28395.28420 · Cited by 3,590
Tools for privacy preserving distributed data mining
Clifton, C., Kantarcioglu, M., Vaidya, J., Lin, X., & Zhu, M. Y. (2002) · ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter · doi:10.1145/772862.772867 · Cited by 890
Cited by
L -diversity: Privacy beyond k -anonymity
Machanavajjhala, A., Kifer, D., Gehrke, J., & Venkitasubramaniam, M. (2007) · ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data · doi:10.1145/1217299.1217302 · Cited by 3,617
Self-citationDifferential Privacy: A Survey of Results
Dwork, C. (2008) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-540-79228-4_1 · Cited by 3,542
t-Closeness: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity and l-Diversity
Li, N., Li, T., & Venkatasubramanian, S. (2007) · 2007 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering · doi:10.1109/icde.2007.367856 · Cited by 3,451
Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
Narayanan, A., & Shmatikov, V. (2008) · 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (sp 2008) · doi:10.1109/sp.2008.33 · Cited by 2,372
Privacy-preserving data publishing: A survey of recent developments
Fung, B. C. M., Wang, K., Chen, R., & Yu, P. S. (2010) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/1749603.1749605 · Cited by 1,704
Metadata
- Authors
- Machanavajjhala, A., Gehrke, J., Kifer, D., & Venkitasubramaniam, M.
- Venue
- 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'06)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2006
- Pages
- 24-24
- ISSN
- 1084-4627 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2134479759
- Cited by
- 2,362
- References
- 4
- FWCI
- 100.13
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: L-diversity: privacy beyond k-anonymity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/icde.2006.1
- The paper
- Machanavajjhala, A., Gehrke, J., Kifer, D., & Venkitasubramaniam, M. (2006). L-diversity: privacy beyond k-anonymity. 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'06). https://doi.org/10.1109/icde.2006.1
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.