Linkage Attack:

A linkage attack is an attempt to re-identify individuals in an anonymized dataset by combining that data with background information. The linking may use quasi-identifiers, such as zip or postcode, gender, salary, and so on that are present in both sets to establish identifying connections.

Many organizations aren’t aware of the linkage risk involving quasi identifiers, and while they may de-identify direct identifiers in a dataset, they often don’t think of de-identifying the quasi-identifiers in the dataset.

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