Review of Privacy Preserving Data Mining

Privacy Preserving Data Mining (PPDM) in a broad sense has been an area of research since 1991 both in the public and private sector and has also been discussed at numerous workshops and international conferences. Currently the research is mainly directed towards development of technical methods, such as application of cryptography or the development of specialized algorithms to meet security and privacy requirements for different data mining methods, such as classification or categorisation. So far PPDM has found application in only a few cases. One example is documented in medical research to protect patients' privacy In all cases when data mining is applied in the context of personal data, basic data and data mining results have to be collected, stored and processed in compliance with data protection legislation. This results in responsibilities for data controllers, technical operators and others involved in those business or governmental processes where data mining plays a role.