Multi-level privacy preserving k-anonymity

k-anonymity is a well-known definition of privacy, which guarantees that any person in the released dataset cannot be distinguished from at least k-1 other individuals. In the protection model, the records are anonymized through generalization or suppression with a fixed value of k. Accordingly, each record has the same level of anonymity in the published dataset. However, different people or items usually have inconsistent privacy requirements. Some records need extra protection while others require a relatively low level of privacy constraint. In this paper, we propose Multi-Level Privacy Preserving K-Anonymity, an advanced protection model based on k-anonymity, which divides records into different groups and requires each group to satisfy its respective privacy requirement. Moreover, we present a practical algorithm using clustering techniques to ensure the property. The evaluation on a real-world dataset confirms that the proposed method has the advantages of offering more flexibility in setting privacy parameters and providing higher data utility than traditional k-anonymity.