Abstract: Recently, privacy concerns about data collection have received an increasing amount of attention. In data collection process, a data collector (an agency) assumed that all respondents would be comfortable with submitting their data if the published data was anonymous. We believe that this assumption is not realistic because the increase in privacy concerns causes some respondents to refuse participation or to submit inaccurate data to such agencies. If respondents submit inaccurate data, then the usefulness of the results from analysis of the collected data cannot be guaranteed. Furthermore, we note that the level of anonymity (i.e., k-anonymity) guaranteed by an agency cannot be verified by respondents since they generally do not have access to all of the data that is released. Therefore, we introduce the notion of k_i-anonymity, where k_i is the level of anonymity preferred by each respondent i. Instead of placing full trust in an agency, our solution increases respondent confidence by allowing each to decide the preferred level of protection. As such, our protocol ensures that respondents achieve their preferred k_i-anonymity during data collection and guarantees that the collected records are genuine and useful for data analysis.

Key words: Anonymous data collection, Respondent-preferred privacy protection, k-anonymity

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