Privacy preserving record linkage using phonetic codes

Abstract

Phonetic codes such as Soundex and Metaphone have been used in the past to address the Record Linkage Problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, no particular effort has been made within this context towards privacy assurance during the matching process. Phonetic codes have an interesting feature which can be cornerstone to providing privacy. They are mappings of strings which do not exhibit the one-to-one property. In this paper, we present a novel protocol for achieving privacy preserving record linkage using phonetics, we provide proof of correctness for our approach and finally we illustrate experimental results concerning performance and matching accuracy. The proposed protocol can be equally well applied to codes different than the phonetic ones, which do not exhibit the one-to-one property, such as hash tables with comparable results. © 2009 IEEE.