Patent ID: 8566350

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for facilitating sanitizing a modified version of a document relative to one or more sensitive topics, wherein the computer includes a processor, the method comprising: obtaining a document and a modified version of the document; determining, by the processor, a privacy risk for a term in the modified version relative to the sensitive topic(s), wherein the privacy risk measures the extent to which the sensitive topics can be inferred based on the term, wherein determining the privacy risk for the term comprises determining a confidence measure cs(t 1 ) for a term t 1 in the modified version of the document relative to sensitive topics s; and displaying via a user interface an information utility and a privacy loss or gain for the modified version, wherein the information utility indicates the extent to which the document has changed and the privacy loss or gain indicates the extent to which the modified version is reduced in sensitivity relative to the document, based on the privacy risk; wherein t 1 ranges over the terms in the document; wherein cs(t 1 ) indicates a ratio of a first number of documents, in a corpus, that contain t 1 and s, to a second number of documents in the corpus that contain t 1 ,; and wherein the privacy risk is associated with the cs(t 1 ) values.