Anonymization Level and Compliance for Differential Privacy: A Systematic Literature Review

Currently, personal data protection and additional methods providing the required level of confidentiality do not meet the current European Union legal norms. It still has numerous research gaps. Thus, securing the correct application of privacy-enhancing technology (PET) methods concerning General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance is the most crucial goal demanded by many stakeholders. To the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic literature review of the overlap between the PET as differential privacy (DP) and compliance domain focusing on assessing the anonymization level regarding legal and technical requirements. Consequently, this review focuses on examining studies on improving the safety of personal data in the framework of evaluating compliance with the anonymization norms and DP concept used by considering the results of existing studies. Additionally, we will investigate the articles that associate anonymity and degree of personal data protection with the DP method. Finally, we will assess the impact of GDPR norms on the anonymization level and the choice of the DP model. To answer these questions, we conduct a systematic literature review. We collect the latest studies published at the leading privacy conferences and classify them according to the GDPR requirement categories. We also provide qualitative analysis of articles representing the category or a specific area in each category and explore and visualize links between categories. Thus, this review aims to provide a snapshot of the current state of affairs in these domains and studies with an additional focus on DP anonymization measures and identify directions for future research.