Privacy in statistical databases is about finding tradeoffs to the tension between the increasing societal and economic demand for accurate information and the legal and ethical obligation to protect the privacy of individuals and enterprises which are the respondents providing the statistical data. In the case of statistical databases, the motivation for respondent privacy is one of survival: data collectors cannot expect to collect accurate information from individual or corporate respondents unless these feel the privacy of their responses is guaranteed.
Beyond respondent privacy, there are two additional privacy dimensions to be considered: privacy for the data owners (organizations owning or gathering the data, who would not like to share the data they have collected at great expense) and privacy for the users (those who submit queries to the database and would like their analyses to stay private).