Publication

Privacy-preserving distributed collaborative filtering

Abstract

We propose a new mechanism to preserve privacy while leveraging user profiles in distributed recommender systems. Our mechanism relies on two contributions: (i) an original obfuscation scheme, and (ii) a randomized dissemination protocol. We show that our obfuscation scheme hides the exact profiles of users without significantly decreasing their utility for recommendation. In addition, we precisely characterize the conditions that make our randomized dissemination protocol differentially private. We compare our mechanism with a non-private as well as with a fully private alternative. We consider a real dataset from a user survey and report on simulations as well as planetlab experiments. We dissect our results in terms of accuracy and privacy trade-offs, bandwidth consumption, as well as resilience to a censorship attack. In short, our extensive evaluation shows that our twofold mechanism provides a good trade-off between privacy and accuracy, with little overhead and high resilience.

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Related concepts (30)
Privacy by design
Privacy by design is an approach to systems engineering initially developed by Ann Cavoukian and formalized in a joint report on privacy-enhancing technologies by a joint team of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (Canada), the Dutch Data Protection Authority, and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research in 1995. The privacy by design framework was published in 2009 and adopted by the International Assembly of Privacy Commissioners and Data Protection Authorities in 2010.
Privacy law
Privacy law is the body of law that deals with the regulating, storing, and using of personally identifiable information, personal healthcare information, and financial information of individuals, which can be collected by governments, public or private organisations, or other individuals. It also applies in the commercial sector to things like trade secrets and the liability that directors, officers, and employees have when handing sensitive information.
Privacy
Privacy (UK, US) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of appropriate use and protection of information. Privacy may also take the form of bodily integrity. There have been many different conceptions of privacy throughout history. Most cultures recognize the right of an individual to withhold aspects of their personal lives from public record.
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