The Risk of Disclosure for Microdata

Assessing the magnitude of the risk of disclosure is not easy, however. Whether a data user or intruder attempts to obtain confidential information from a public use file depends on the perceived costs of identifying a record and the perceived probability of success, for example. In this paper, a decision theoretic framework for risk assessment that includes both the intruder's strategy for identifying a record and the information gained by the intruder is developed.