K-anonymity

K-anonymity is when we try to protect people's personal information while still being able to use that information for things like research or analysis. Let's imagine you go to a school with lots of other kids, and you all have to wear name tags so your teacher knows who you are. But, your teacher starts noticing that some kids have the same name or are from the same family, and it's making it easy for other people to figure out who they are just by looking at their name tag. So, your teacher decides that everyone needs to have a nickname on their name tag instead of their real name. That way, the information is still there, but it's less obvious who each person really is.

Similarly, k-anonymity works by grouping together people who have similar information. For example, imagine a researcher is trying to learn about the height of people in a certain town. Instead of knowing the exact height of each person, they group the people into categories based on their height range. So, instead of saying "Billy is 5'9" tall", they would say "Billy is in the group of people who are between 5'6" and 6' tall." That way, even if someone wanted to find out Billy's exact height, they wouldn't be able to because it's grouped with a bunch of other people who have similar heights.

Overall, k-anonymity helps protect people's personal information by making it harder for other people to figure out who they are based on shared data.