Privacy in statistical databases is about finding tradeoffs to the tension between the increasing societal and economical 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: statistical agencies or survey institutes 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). Co-utility has shown to provide sustainable solutions to user privacy.

"Privacy in Statistical Databases 2018" (PSD 2018) is a conference sponsored and organized by the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy with proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Generous support by the Templeton World Charity Foundation is acknowledged. The purpose of PSD 2018 is to attract world-wide, high-level research in statistical database privacy.

PSD 2018 is a successor to PSD 2016 (Dubrovnik, Sep. 14-16, 2016), PSD 2014 (Eivissa, Sep. 17-19, 2014), PSD 2012 (Palermo, Sep. 26-28, 2012), PSD 2010 (Corfu, Sep. 22-24, 2010), PSD 2008 (Istanbul, Sep. 24-26, 2008), PSD 2006 (Rome, Dec. 13-15, 2006) and PSD 2004 (Barcelona, June 9-11, 2004), all with proceedings published by Springer in LNCS 9867, LNCS 8744, LNCS 7556, LNCS 6344, LNCS 5262, LNCS 4302 and LNCS 3050, respectively. Those seven PSD conferences follow a tradition of high-quality technical conferences on SDC which started with "Statistical Data Protection-SDP'98", held in Lisbon in 1998 and with proceedings published by OPOCE, and continued with the AMRADS project SDC Workshop, held in Luxemburg in 2001 and with proceedings published in Springer LNCS 2316.

Like the aforementioned preceding conferences, PSD 2018 originates in Europe, but wishes to stay a worldwide event in database privacy and SDC. Thus, contributions and attendees from overseas are welcome.