Enforcing anonymity in the auditing of electronic documents
US10558822B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Dec 15, 2015 |
| Grant date | Feb 11, 2020 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Dec 15, 2035 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
- CPC primaryH04L51/48
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for anonymizing electronic documents. In accordance with one or more embodiments, structurally-similar electronic documents can be identified among a group of electronic documents (e.g., e-mail messages, documents containing HTML formatting, etc.). A hash function can be specifically tailored to identify the similarly structured documents. The structurally-similar electronic documents can be grouped into a same equivalence class. Masked anonymized document samples can be generated from the structurally-similar electronic documents utilizing the same equivalence class, thereby ensuring that the anonymized document samples when viewed as a part of an audit remain anonymous. An online process is provided to guarantee k-anonymity of the users over the entire lifetime of the auditing process. An auditor's productivity can be measured based on the amount of content revealed to the auditor within the samples he is assigned. The auditor's productivity is maximized while ensuring anonymization over the lifetime of the audit.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.