Read the Assessment Results
Once you have run the assessment, it is important to understand how to interpret the results. Because the disclosure risk measures discussed above provide you with a probability of a disclosure taking place, your own judgement remains important when deciding how to proceed. Watch this video to learn more about what the risk probability means and the actions you might take to lower the risk.
Key Takeaways
Consider different risk measures when interpreting the assessment results.
Calculating these different disclosure risk measures helps you decide whether and how to share your data. On HDX, we calculate the global risk and review k-anonymity for all microdata shared on the platform.
Set a risk threshold that is right for your organization and context.
The risk threshold will vary according to who you are sharing the data with and the and the sensitivity of data in your context. When setting your risk threshold, consider existing institutional policies, guidelines, and applicable regulations in the country of operation. On HDX, our threshold for Global Risk of microdata is 3%.
Approach the global risk measure with caution.
A common way to calculate the Global Risk is to take the average of the individual disclosure risk scores. Even if the global risk is below the agreed risk threshold, there could still be a small number of individuals in the dataset with high individual risk.
General Questions
There is no one size fits all approach to managing this disclosure risk. You will need to determine if it is possible to apply statistical disclosure control techniques to reduce this risk while maintaining the analytical value of the data. If this is not possible, you should explore safe ways of sharing the data with trusted partners under strict terms and conditions. Continue to the next step to learn more about your options if you conduct the risk assessment and determine that the data has a high risk of disclosure.
You can and you should! If you run the assessment and identify that the disclosure risk is too high, you can decide to apply SDC techniques such as recoding and local suppression to reduce that risk. Following the application of disclosure control techniques, you will need to run the assessment again to make sure that the actions you took were sufficient in limiting the risk of disclosure.