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Annual Privacy Forum

APF 2022: Privacy Technologies and Policy pp 88–96Cite as

Fifty Shades of Personal Data – Partial Re-identification and GDPR

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 13279)

Abstract

This paper takes a look at data re-identification as an economic game where the attacker is assumed to be rational, i.e. performs attacks for a gain. In order to evaluate expectancy for this gain, we need to assess the attack success probability, which in turn depends on the level of re-identification. In the context of GDPR, possibility of various levels of re-identification is a grey area – it is neither explicitly prohibited, nor endorsed. We argue that the risk-based approach of GDPR would benefit from greater clarity in this regard. We present an explicit, yet general, attacker model that does not fit well into the current treatment of GDPR, and give it a high-level game-theoretic analysis.

Keywords

  • Data re-identification
  • Privacy attacks
  • Cost-benefit analysis
  • GDPR

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Triin Siil, Tiina Ilus, Tanel Mällo and Kati Sein for fruitful discussions. The paper has been supported by the Estonian Research Council under the grant number PRG920.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cybernetica AS, Narva mnt 20, 51009, Tartu, Estonia

    Jan Willemson

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  1. Jan Willemson
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Correspondence to Jan Willemson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Agnieszka Gryszczyńska

  2. Koźmiński University, Warsaw, Poland

    Przemysław Polański

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Nils Gruschka

  4. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Kai Rannenberg

  5. ENISA, Athens, Greece

    Monika Adamczyk

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Willemson, J. (2022). Fifty Shades of Personal Data – Partial Re-identification and GDPR. In: Gryszczyńska, A., Polański, P., Gruschka, N., Rannenberg, K., Adamczyk, M. (eds) Privacy Technologies and Policy. APF 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13279. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07315-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07315-1_6

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