Scalable Distributed Data Anonymization for Large Datasets

$k$
-Anonymity and
$\ell$
-diversity are two well-known privacy metrics that guarantee protection of the respondents of a dataset by obfuscating information that can disclose their identities and sensitive information. Existing solutions for enforcing them implicitly assume to operate in a centralized scenario, since they require complete visibility over the dataset to be anonymized, and can therefore have limited applicability in anonymizing large datasets. In this article, we propose a solution that extends Mondrian (an efficient and effective approach designed for achieving
$k$
-anonymity) for enforcing both
$k$
-anonymity and
$\ell$
-diversity over large datasets in a distributed manner, leveraging the parallel computation of multiple workers. Our approach efficiently distributes the computation among the workers, without requiring visibility over the dataset in its entirety. Our data partitioning limits the need for workers to exchange data, so that each worker can independently anonymize a portion of the dataset. We implemented our approach providing parallel execution on a dynamically chosen number of workers. The experimental evaluation shows that our solution provides scalability, while not affecting the quality of the resulting anonymization.