Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage

TL;DR

This paper reviews Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL), a method for linking records across databases without exposing personal data, highlighting its challenges, applications, and recent research advances.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of PPRL, including its definition, key literature, and discussion of current research challenges and applications.

Findings

PPRL enables record linkage without revealing sensitive data.

Various techniques and protocols have been developed for privacy-preserving linkage.

Research challenges include balancing privacy and linkage accuracy.

Abstract

Given several databases containing person-specific data held by different organizations, Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) aims to identify and link records that correspond to the same entity/individual across different databases based on the matching of personal identifying attributes, such as name and address, without revealing the actual values in these attributes due to privacy concerns. This reference work entry defines the PPRL problem, reviews the literature and key findings, and discusses applications and research challenges.