This collection of nine inviting chapters discusses current materials concerned with privacy-preserving data management, statistical disclosure control (how to generate statistics without identifying individuals), and application privacy in actions such as data mining and social networks. Advanced students, data managers, privacy experts, and computer scientists will generally find something useful in these materials.

Two chapters introduce the broad topic of privacy in information and data management systems. These provide a broad introduction to the remaining materials, as well as the techniques of randomization and dataset anonymization in time-varying data contexts. From this beginning, a chapter discusses statistical disclosure packages such as sdcMicro and the open-source sdcTable. Chapter 4 discusses disclosure risk on data drawn from the 2001 UK census.

The risk of disclosure is further analyzed in the context of auxiliary information that may contain rare but identifying traits. Several disclosure risk estimators such as those of the SPREE-type and a modified Skinner estimator are examined. Another chapter examines tabular data protection with a focus on the “cell suppression problem” and “controlled tabular adjustment.”

Of particular interest is a chapter devoted to privacy protection in data mining. The suggested technique for privacy is to utilize an extension of the SPAM algorithm for mining patterns. Suggestions for future work are discussed as well. Pseudonymized data sharing with individual researchers is possible using an algorithm that allows interaction between datasets if a cryptographic key is available. An appropriate concluding chapter addresses the yet unfolding privacy issues and solutions in social networks.

There is little discussion of the broader social and political issues of privacy in this technical treatment, although each chapter contains an abundance of references. Realizing that one treatise cannot do everything, a chapter devoted to the future of these issues would have been helpful. However, this collection does provide a useful introduction to this important topic.