A Data Privacy Taxonomy

Abstract

Privacy has become increasingly important to the database community which is reflected by a noteworthy increase in research papers appearing in the literature. While researchers often assume that their definition of “privacy” is universally held by all readers, this is rarely the case; so many papers addressing key challenges in this domain have actually produced results that do not consider the same problem, even when using similar vocabularies. This paper provides an explicit definition of data privacy suitable for ongoing work in data repositories such as a DBMS or for data mining. The work contributes by briefly providing the larger context for the way privacy is defined legally and legislatively but primarily provides a taxonomy capable of thinking of data privacy technologically. We then demonstrate the taxonomy’s utility by illustrating how this perspective makes it possible to understand the important contribution made by researchers to the issue of privacy. The conclusion of this paper is that privacy is indeed multifaceted so no single current research effort adequately addresses the true breadth of the issues necessary to fully understand the scope of this important issue.