Assessing Local Differential Privacy for Compliance with the Personal Data Protection Law in Integrated Data Systems

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Authors: Randa Aljably
Cited by: 1
References: 9

Abstract

Organizations increasingly integrate and share person-level data across internal platforms and external partners to enable analytics, digital services, and evidence-based decision making. However, combining quasi-identifiers across systems and releases can enable re-identification via linkage attacks, creating regulatory compliance and trust risks. This paper proposes an operational methodology for (i) identifying direct identifiers and quasi-identifiers (QIs), (ii) quantifying baseline re-identification risk using uniqueness and prosecutor-style risk proxies, and (iii) applying Local Differential Privacy (LDP) to reduce link-ability prior to data sharing. We implement categorical LDP using a Generalized Randomized Response (GRR) mechanism and evaluate privacy-utility trade-offs through a sensitivity analysis over the privacy budget ε. Utility is quantified using (a) distributional distortion (total variation distance) and (b) downstream task performance (job-title classification). We further address reviewer concerns by discussing repeated releases, privacy accounting as mitigations for longitudinal deployments, and by improving figure readability and updating related work with recent studies.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data Privacy Security and Data Protection Information and Cyber Security

Publication details

Journal / source
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Volume
21
Issue
3
Pages
e0342692–e0342692
Publication date
30 March 2026
Language
EN