System and method for objective quantification and mitigation of privacy risk

Abstract

A system and method for objective quantification and mitigation of privacy-risk of a dataset is disclosed. These include an input-output (IO) interface for receiving at least one input dataset, and a configuration file governing the anonymization; a scoring engine including: a uniqueness sub-engine for determining uniqueness scores at data and data-subject level across both individual columns and combinations of columns; a similarity sub-engine that calculates the overlap, reproducibility and similarity by comparing all columns and subsets of columns between at least two datasets, modified, anonymized or synthetic version of original dataset; a statistical sub-engine that calculates statistics that are an indication of privacy-risks and re-identification risks; a contextual sub-engine for quantifying contextual factors by considering weighted approaches and producing a single context-centric score; and a recommendation engine identifying mitigating measures to reduce the privacy-risks by taking in to account the factors that are contributing to higher risk.