Patent ID: 8332959

Claim:
A privacy risk assessment system comprising: an information system comprising a computer-readable program stored on a non-transitory computer readable medium configured to disclose information to a third party, said program including: a risk determination model configured to compute identifiability risk for a given set of attributes in one or more records r of a population table, the identifiability risk being computed using probability computations based on a cell size that comprises a subset of records from the population table that have values of attributes which are equal to values of the given set of attributes in the one or more records, the identifiability risk being based on the estimate of probability that information in the one or more records disclosed to the third party can be used by the third party to identify a person, and the identifiability risk being compared to a threshold prior to being disclosed to the third party, wherein the information system is informed of the identifiability risk exceeding the threshold prior to disclosure to the third party, wherein the risk determination model is further configured to predict identifiability risk based on approximated values of the cell size, wherein predicted identifiability risk is: I p = ∑ i = 1 n ⁢ p i D K ⁡ ( r i ) where D K (r i ) is the number of records in the population table that have values of all attributes in a set of key attributes K equal to the values of corresponding attributes in r i , and where P i is the probability that an individual i appears in the cell size.