Privacy protection for RFID data

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a technology of automatic object identification. Retailers and manufacturers have created compelling business cases for deploying RFID in their supply chains. Yet, the uniquely identifiable objects pose a privacy threat to individuals. In this paper, we study the privacy threats caused by publishing RFID data. Even if the explicit identifying information, such as name and social security number, has been removed from the published RFID data, an adversary may identify a target victim's record or infer her sensitive value by matching a priori known visited locations and timestamps. RFID data by default is high-dimensional and sparse, so applying traditional K-anonymity to RFID data suffers from the curse of high dimensionality, and would result in poor data usefulness. We define a new privacy model, develop an anonymization algorithm to accommodate special challenges on RFID data, and evaluate its performance in terms of data quality, efficiency, and scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on anonymizing high-dimensional RFID data.