Overview
An ever increasing amount of personal data is collected and analyzed at both individual and population levels by businesses for improving products and services, by governments for policy-making and national security, and by scientists. On the other hand, there is a growing concern of the involved individuals about their privacy when anonymized personal data is disclosed. In this project, we put the anonymization techniques used in Switzerland under close scrutiny. The goal is to provide knowledge about the accessibility of personal data suitable for cross-linking and to develop a computational tool that checks for weak points of already anonymized data in that scope. The combined results will be used to develop best practices for application domain experts who are frequently not experts in privacy. The results of this project help to minimize the risks of exposing the identities of included individuals if anonymized personal data are shared with third parties or published in open media such as the Internet.
