Privacy Preservation Using Multi-Context Systems ⋆

Abstract. Preserving the privacy of sensitive data is one of the major challenges which the information society has to face. Traditional approaches focused on the infrastructure for identifying data which is to be kept private and for managing access rights to these data. However, while these efforts are useful, they do not address an important aspect: While the sensitive data itself can be protected nicely using these mechanisms, related data, which is deemed insensitive per se may be used to infer sensitive data. This can be achieved by combining insensitive data or by exploiting specific background knowledge of the domain of discourse. In this note, we show that resolving this problem can be achieved in a simple and elegant way by using multi-context systems.