Title
BlurMe: inferring and obfuscating user gender based on ratings
Abstract
User demographics, such as age, gender and ethnicity, are routinely used for targeting content and advertising products to users. Similarly, recommender systems utilize user demographics for personalizing recommendations and overcoming the cold-start problem. Often, privacy-concerned users do not provide these details in their online profiles. In this work, we show that a recommender system can infer the gender of a user with high accuracy, based solely on the ratings provided by users (without additional metadata), and a relatively small number of users who share their demographics. Focusing on gender, we design techniques for effectively adding ratings to a user's profile for obfuscating the user's gender, while having an insignificant effect on the recommendations provided to that user.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2365952.2365989
RecSys
Keywords
Field
DocType
online profile,cold-start problem,personalizing recommendation,privacy-concerned user,recommender system,advertising product,obfuscating user gender,additional metadata,insignificant effect,high accuracy,user demographics,privacy,recommender systems,obfuscation
Recommender system,Metadata,World Wide Web,Computer science,Inference,Demographics,Obfuscation
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
49
1.50
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Udi Weinsberg145422.51
Smriti Bhagat232514.71
Stratis Ioannidis371551.97
Nina Taft42109154.92