Does enforcing anonymity mean decreasing data usefulness?

Preserving data privacy is becoming an urgent issue to cope with. Among different technologies, anonymization techniques offer many advantages, even if preliminary investigations suggest that they could deteriorate the usefulness of data. We carried out an empirical study in order to understand to which extent it is possible to enforce anonymization, and thus protect sensitive information, without degrading usefulness of data under unacceptable thresholds. Moreover, we analyzed also if re-writing queries could help reduce drawbacks of anonymization.

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