World Wide Web DOI 10.1007/s11280-015-0327-3 Anonymizing multimedia documents Bechara Al Bouna · Eliana J. Raad · Richard Chbeir · Charbel Elia · Ramzi Haraty Received: 11 March 2014 / Revised: 18 October 2014 / Accepted: 6 January 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Multimedia documents sharing and outsourcing have become part of the rou- tine activity of many individuals and companies. Such data sharing puts at risk the privacy of individuals, whose identities need to be kept secret, when adversaries get the ability to associate the multimedia document’s content to possible trail of information left behind by the individual. In this paper, we propose de-linkability, a privacy-preserving constraint to bound the amount of information outsourced that can be used to re-identify individu- als. We provide a sanitizing MD ∗ -algorithm to enforce de-linkability along with a utility function to evaluate the utility of multimedia documents that is preserved after the sani- tizing process. A set of experiments are elaborated to demonstrate the efficiency of our technique. Keywords Data privacy · Anonymity · De-linkability · Multimedia document B. Al Bouna () · C. Elia Ticket Labs, Antonine University, Baabda, Lebanon e-mail: bechara.albouna@upa.edu.lb C. Elia e-mail: charbel.elia@upa.edu.lb E. J. Raad LE2I-CNRS, Bourgogne University, Dijon, France e-mail: eliana.raad@u-bourgogne.fr R. Chbeir LIUPPA Laboratory, University of Pau and Adour Countries, Pau, France e-mail: richard.chbeir@univ-pau.fr R. Haraty School of Arts, Sciences, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon e-mail: rharaty@lau.edu.lb