These days the digitization process is everywhere,
spreading also across central governments and local authorities.
It is hoped that, using open government data for scientific
research purposes, the public good and social justice might be
enhanced. Taking into account the European General Data
Protection Regulation recently adopted, the big challenge in
Portugal and other European countries, is how to provide the
right balance between personal data privacy and data value for
research. This work presents a sensitivity study of data
anonymization procedure applied to a real open government data
available from the Brazilian higher education evaluation system.
The ARX k-anonymization algorithm, with and without
generalization of some research value variables, was performed.
The analysis of the amount of data / information lost and the risk
of re-identification suggest that the anonymization process may
lead to the under-representation of minorities and
sociodemographic disadvantaged groups. It will enable scientists
to improve the balance among risk, data usability, and
contributions for the public good policies and practices.