Title
Incognito: A Method for Obfuscating Web Data.
Abstract
Users leave a trail of their personal data, interests, and intents while surfing or sharing information on the Web. Web data could therefore reveal some private/sensitive information about users based on inference analysis. The possible identification of information corresponding to a single individual by an inference attack holds true even if the user identifiers are encoded or removed in the Web data. Several works have been done on improving privacy of Web data through obfuscation methods~\citeHow09,Dom09,Sha05,Che14. However, these methods are neither comprehensive, generic to be applicable to any Web data, nor effective against adversarial attacks. To this end, we propose a privacy-aware obfuscation method for Web data addressing these identified drawbacks of existing methods. We use probabilistic methods to predict privacy risk of Web data that incorporates all key privacy aspects, which are uniqueness, uniformity, and linkability of Web data. The Web data with high predicted risk are then obfuscated by our method to minimize the privacy risk using semantically similar data. Our method is resistant against adversary who has knowledge about the datasets and model learned risk probabilities using differential privacy-based noise addition. Experimental study conducted on two real Web datasets validates the significance and efficacy of our method. Our results indicate that the average privacy risk reaches to 100% with a minimum of 10 sensitive Web entries, while at most 0% privacy risk could be attained with our obfuscation method at the cost of average utility loss of 64.3%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3178876.3186093
WWW '18: The Web Conference 2018 Lyon France April, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web Data Privacy, Privacy Risk Evaluation, Data Obfuscation, Adversarial Machine Learning, Probabilistic Model, Semantic Similarity
Semantic similarity,Data mining,Differential privacy,Identifier,Inference,Computer science,Adversarial machine learning,Inference attack,Obfuscation,Information sensitivity
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5639-8
0
0.34
References 
Authors
24
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rahat Masood1407.94
Dinusha Vatsalan220919.57
Ikram Muhammad3187.16
Mohamed Ali Kâafar498475.45