Research issues in Privacy-preserving Record Linkage

Record linkage from multiple, independent and heterogeneous databases is a major area of database research. However, little attention has been paid to the privacy concerns of colluding databases. Activities such as sharing data for scientific research, monitoring disease symptoms over a region or developing large e-commerce market place, all require large scale data integration among different organizations. Legitimate concerns over data security and privacy have caused organizations to be reluctant to collaborate in any data sharing protocol; thus a data integration protocol applicable for private databases is needed. Privacy-preserving Record Linkage (PRL) deals with the development of such a protocol. This paper presents the PRL key ideas and research challenges.