Privacy-preserving data linkage and geocoding: Current approaches and research directions

Data linkage is the task of matching and aggregating records that relate to the same entity from one or more data sets. A related technique is geocoding, the matching of addresses to their geographic locations. As data linkage is often based on personal information (like names and addresses), privacy and confidentiality are of paramount importance. In this paper we present an overview of current approaches to privacy-preserving data linkage, and discuss their limitations. Using real-world scenarios we illustrate the significance of developing improved techniques for automated, large scale and distributed privacy-preserving linking and geocoding. We then discuss four core research areas that need to be addressed in order to make linking and geocoding of large confidential data collections feasible.