Towards the formalization of re-identification for some data masking methods

Re-identification methods are in common use in data privacy for disclosure risk assessment. Record linkage is one of these re-identification methods. Given two data files, record linkage establishes links between records that correspond to the same individual but are found in the two different files. In this paper we review our definition of re-identification, which is based on belief functions. The use of these functions permits us to model in an appropriate way the uncertainty inherent in the re-identification process. Then, we discuss record linkage for data masked using approaches that ensure k-anonymity, and for data masked using rank swapping p-bucket.