Question & Answer: Cite a real-world database situation in which the sensitivity of an aggregate is greater than that of its constituent values. Th…..

An example where the aggregate data is higher sensitivity can be easily found in the case of financial transactions. An individual transaction may be completely innocuous, and have little importance or significance on it’s own. However, a collected history of transactions could reveal an underlying trading pattern, other proprietary information, or even illegal activity.

A classic case of individual data having higher sensitivity than the aggregate is in public key cryptography. Here the aggregate data is the hashed (encrypted) document, which is a combination of the user’s private key and the original document. The encrypted document is secure (i.e. not sensitive), but clearly the user’s private key is highly sensitive, the release of which would compromise all her/his data.