Geocode matching and privacy preservation

Geocoding is the process of matching addresses to geographic locations, such as latitudes and longitudes, or local census areas. In many applications, addresses are the key to geo-spatial data analysis and mining. Privacy and confidentiality are of paramount importance when data from, for example, cancer registries or crime databases is geocoded. Various approaches to privacy-preserving data matching, also called record linkage or entity resolution, have been developed in recent times. However, most of these approaches have not considered the specific privacy issues involved in geocode matching. This paper provides a brief introduction to privacy-preserving data and geocode matching, and using several real-world scenarios the issues involved in privacy and confidentiality for data and geocode matching are illustrated. The challenges of making privacy-preserving matching practical for real-world applications are highlighted, and potential directions for future research are discussed.