Data mining as a tool in privacy-preserving data publishing

Many databases contain data about individuals that are valuable for research, marketing, and decision making. Sharing or publishing data about individuals is however prone to privacy attacks, breaches, and disclosures. The concern here is about individuals' privacy – keeping the sensitive information about individuals private to them. Data mining in this setting has been shown to be a powerful tool to breach privacy and make disclosures. In contrast, data mining can be also used in practice to aid data owners in their decision on how to share and publish their databases. We present and discuss the role and uses of data mining in these scenarios and also briefly discuss other approaches to private data analysis.