A formal quantitative study of privacy in the publication of official educational censuses in Brazil

Abstract

We present a summary of the work done in the dissertation A formal quantitative study of privacy in the publication of official educational censuses in Brazil, including its contributions and impacts so far. The dissertation presents a systematic refactoring of the conventional treatment of privacy analyses, based on mathematical concepts from the framework of Quantitative Information Flow (QIF). This brings three principal advantages: flexibility, allowing for precise quantification and comparison of privacy risks for attacks both known and novel; computational tractability for very large, longitudinal datasets; and explainable results both to politicians and to the general public. We apply our approach to a very large case study: the educational censuses in Brazil, which comprise over 90 attributes of approximately 50 million individuals released longitudinally every year since 2007.