Finding a Needle in a Haystack: The Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assessing Disclosure Risk for Contextualized Microdata

Our study describes various factors that are of concern when evaluating disclosure risk of contextualized microdata and some of the empirical steps that are involved in their assessment. Utilizing synthetic sets of survey respondents, we illustrate how different postulates shape the assessment of risk when considering: (1) estimated probabilities that unidentified geographic areas are represented within a survey; (2) the number of people in the population who share the same personal and contextual identifiers as a respondent; and (3) the anticipated amount of coverage error in census population counts and extant files that provide identifying information (like names and addresses).