Oracle Corporation
Associating anonymous information with personally identifiable information in a non-identifiable manner

Abstract:

The present disclosure provides a detailed description of techniques used in methods, systems, and computer program products for associating anonymous information with personally identifiable information without sharing any personally identifiable information. A method receives a specification record comprising one or more specified demographic attributes to be used in user record selection operations, the results of which operations include user records that comprise a user identifier and at least some non-personally-identifiable information. A candidate group is formed by applying a set of rules over the retrieved user records to exclude one or more user records that comprise mutually-exclusive characteristics with respect to the other user records in the candidate group. An anonymity measure is calculated over the candidate group to satisfy a threshold of anonymity. If needed to satisfy the threshold of anonymity, additional user records are added to the group before any sharing operations. Anonymity of the users is preserved.