French Data Protection Authority CNIL Republishes Francis‘ Article

The French Data Protection Authority CNIL has recognized the benefits of Diffix anonymization by republishing an article by Paul Francis in which the utility of Diffix anonymization is highlighted. Diffix is the anonymization technology developed in joint research between Francis‘ group and Aircloak GmbH.

Last year, CNIL published an article titled „Can anonymized data still be useful.“ The purpose of the article was to demonstrate that strong anonymization does not necessarily prevent useful analytics. In this work, CNIL uses K-anonymity on the New York City taxi database. Inspired by this effort, Francis shows that Diffix can be used for a wide range of analysis on the NYC taxi database, including trip times to LaGuardia airport, taxi driver work profiles, and congestion in the Manhattan financial district.

CNIL re-published the article under the title „Anonymity vs. Utility: Another shot at Anonymizing the New York City taxi dataset„.