Wikipedia
k-anonymity is a property possessed by certain anonymized data. The concept of k-anonymity was first formulated by Latanya Sweeney in a paper published in 2002 as an attempt to solve the problem: "Given person-specific field-structured data, produce a release of the data with scientific guarantees that the individuals who are the subjects of the data cannot be re-identified while the data remain practically useful." A release of data is said to have the k-anonymity property if the information for each person contained in the release cannot be distinguished from at least k-1 individuals whose information also appear in the release. The various procedures and programs for generating anonymised data providing k-anonymity protection have been patented in the United States (Patent 7,269,578).