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. 2021 Jun 17;136(5):554–561. doi: 10.1177/00333549211026817

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© 2021, Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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An example of how k-anonymity field suppression changes the values of quasi-identifier fields sex, age_group, race_ethnicity_combined to reduce the risk of re-identification of individuals in 2 public datasets developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 for COVID-19 case surveillance. When the frequency count of raw records with shared quasi-identifiers is below the k = 5 privacy threshold, suppressed data are produced with “NA” values for some quasi-identifiers so that the frequency increases to 5. Abbreviation: NA, not applicable.