skip to main content
10.1145/2046556.2046579acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesccsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

I know where you live: analyzing privacy protection in public databases

Published: 17 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Policymakers struggle to determine the proper tradeoffs between data accessibility and data-subject privacy as public records move online. For example, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania recently eliminated the ability to search the county property assessment database using property owners' names. We conducted a user study to determine whether this strategy provides effective privacy protection against a non-expert adversary. We found that removing search by name provides some increased privacy protection, because some users were unable to use other means to determine the address of an individual. However, this privacy protection is limited, and interface usability problems presented a comparable barrier. Our analysis suggests that if policymakers use removal of search by name as a privacy mechanism they should attempt to mitigate usability issues that can hinder legitimate use of public records databases.

References

[1]
Allegheny County Assessment. http://www2.county.egheny.pa.us/RealEstate/Search.aspx. {Last accessed 2011.06.20}.
[2]
How to Obtain Public Records in Allegheny County and more. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 01, 2002. Available at http://www.post-gazette.com/FirstAmendment/OpenRecs.asp.
[3]
A. Bepko. Public Availability or Practical Obscurity: The Debate Over Public Access to Court Records on the Internet. New York Law School Law Review, 49:967, 2004.
[4]
S. Bermann. Privacy and Access to Public Records in the Information Age. Bepress Legal Series, page 1303, 2006.
[5]
D. Majors. Onorato Seeks Partial Web Site Blackout. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 20, 2007. Available at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07293/827036-85.stm.
[6]
L. Dobrica. CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT CITIES WEBSITES EVALUATION. In Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on e-Society, 2007.
[7]
C. Dwork. Differential privacy: A Survey of Results. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Theory and applications of models of computation, TAMC'08, pages 1--19, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer-Verlag.
[8]
J. Gant and D. Gant. Web portal functionality and state government e-service. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2002 (HICSS), pages 1627 -- 1636, Jan 2002.
[9]
B. Givens. Public Records on the Internet: the Privacy Dilemma. In CFP '02: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, pages 1--7, New York, NY, USA, 2002. ACM.
[10]
Google.com. Tools for Public Sector Organizations-Frequently Asked Questions. http://www.google.com/publicsector/content/faq.html#43. {Last accessed 2011.06.20}.
[11]
J. Vellucci. Allegheny Council Votes to End Online Name Search of Property Records. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, November 21, 2007. Available at http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_539028.html?source=rss&feed=7.
[12]
J. Lee. Dirty laundry, online for all to see. New York Times, September 05, 2002. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/05/technology/dirty-laundry-online-for-all-to-see.html?pagewanted=1.
[13]
A. Machanavajjhala, D. Kifer, J. Abowd, J. Gehrke, and L. Vilhuber. Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, pages 277--286, Washington, DC, USA, 2008. IEEE Computer Society.
[14]
L. Morgan. Strengthening the Lock on the Bedroom Door: The Case Against Access to Divorce Court Records On Line. Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 17:45, 2001.
[15]
M. Sleeper, D. Sharma, and L. Faith Cranor. I Know Where You Live: Analyzing Privacy Protection in Public Databases. Technical Report Carnegie Mellon University-CyLab-11-015, Carnegie Mellon University, 2011.
[16]
D. J. Solove. Access and Aggregation: Public Records, Privacy and the Constitution. Minnesota Law Review, 86:1137, 2001.
[17]
L. Sweeney. k-anonymity: A Model for Protecting Privacy. Int. J. Uncertain. Fuzziness Knowl.-Based Syst., 10:557--570, October 2002.
[18]
L. Wang, S. Bretschneider, and J. Gant. Evaluating Web-Based E-Government Services with a Citizen-Centric Approach. In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 5 - Volume 05, pages 129.2--, Washington, DC, USA, 2005. IEEE Computer Society.
[19]
P. A. Winn. Judicial Information Management in an Electronic Age: Old Standards, New Challenges. Federal Courts Law Review, Forthcoming, 2009.
[20]
X. Xiao and Y. Tao. M-invariance: Towards Privacy Preserving Re-publication of Dynamic Datasets. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pages 689--700. ACM, 2007.

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
WPES '11: Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
October 2011
192 pages
ISBN:9781450310024
DOI:10.1145/2046556
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. practical obscurity
  2. privacy
  3. public databases
  4. public policy

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CCS'11
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 106 of 355 submissions, 30%

Upcoming Conference

CCS '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 30 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media