The Israeli MOH databases on Covid patient numbers have a lower cutoff value on published numbers of patients. How does this protect privacy? The Israeli ministry of health reports many statistics on Covid patients (Numbers of confirmed cases, hospitalizations, people in quarantine - Divided by age and other demographics) available here (Albeit only in Hebrew)
In any category, numbers below 15 are reported as &lt;15 (see e.g. this table, with statistics on medical personnel cases). Someone told me this was for privacy protection reasons, but I don't understand why.
Does this make sense? How is privacy compromised if exact low numbers are published?
It means any number lower than 15 is sufficiently small over a sufficiently large feature space so that identifiable data can be inferred by brute force reverse engineering.