Data Privacy for Record Linkage and Beyond

In a data-driven world, two prominent research problems are record linkage and data privacy. Record linkage is essential for improving decision-making by integrating information on the same entities from multiple data sources. At the same time, data privacy research seeks to balance the need to extract accurate insights from data with the imperative to protect the privacy of the entities involved. These two challenges can be inherently intertwined, as privacy concerns inevitably arise in the context of record linkage. This article focuses on two complementary aspects at the intersection of these two fields: (1) ensuring privacy during record linkage and (2) mitigating privacy risks when releasing analysis results after record linkage. In particular, we discuss privacy-preserving record linkage, differentially private regression, and related topics.