Skip to main content

User Privacy in Recommender Systems

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13982))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Recommender systems process abundances of user data to generate recommendations that fit well to each individual user. This utilization of user data can pose severe threats to user privacy, e.g., the inadvertent leakage of user data to untrusted parties or other users. Moreover, this data can be used to reveal a user’s identity, or to infer very private information as, e.g., gender. Instead of the plain application of privacy-enhancing techniques, which could lead to decreased accuracy, we tackle the problem itself, i.e., the utilization of user data. With this, we aim to equip recommender systems with means to provide high-quality recommendations that respect users’ privacy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Beigi, G., Liu, H.: “Identifying novel privacy issues of online users on social media platforms” by Ghazaleh Beigi and Huan Liu with Martin Vesely as coordinator. SIGWEB Newsl. (Winter) (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3293874.3293878

  2. Beigi, G., Liu, H.: A survey on privacy in social media: identification, mitigation, and applications. ACM Trans. Data Sci. 1(1), 1–38 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Berkovsky, S., Kuflik, T., Ricci, F.: The impact of data obfuscation on the accuracy of collaborative filtering. Expert Syst. Appl. 39(5), 5033–5042 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Berlioz, A., Friedman, A., Kaafar, M.A., Boreli, R., Berkovsky, S.: Applying differential privacy to matrix factorization. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 107–114 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Biega, A.J., Potash, P., Daumé, H., Diaz, F., Finck, M.: Operationalizing the legal principle of data minimization for personalization. In: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 399–408 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Dwork, C.: Differential privacy: a survey of results. In: Agrawal, M., Du, D., Duan, Z., Li, A. (eds.) TAMC 2008. LNCS, vol. 4978, pp. 1–19. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79228-4_1

    Chapter  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Ekstrand, M.D., Joshaghani, R., Mehrpouyan, H.: Privacy for all: ensuring fair and equitable privacy protections. In: Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, pp. 35–47. PMLR (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Friedman, A., Berkovsky, S., Kaafar, M.A.: A differential privacy framework for matrix factorization recommender systems. User Model. User-Adap. Inter. 26(5), 425–458 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-016-9177-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Gao, C., Huang, C., Lin, D., Jin, D., Li, Y.: DPLCF: differentially private local collaborative filtering. In: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 961–970 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gentry, C.: A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme. Stanford University (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Ha, D., Dai, A., Le, Q.V.: Hypernetworks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.09106 (2016)

  12. Herlocker, J.L., Konstan, J.A., Borchers, A., Riedl, J.: An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering. In: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 230–237 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Hou, D., Zhang, J., Ma, J., Zhu, X., Man, K.L.: Application of differential privacy for collaborative filtering based recommendation system: a survey. In: 2021 12th International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms and Programming (PAAP), pp. 97–101. IEEE (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Jeckmans, A.J., Beye, M., Erkin, Z., Hartel, P., Lagendijk, R.L., Tang, Q.: Privacy in recommender systems. In: Ramzan, N., van Zwol, R., Lee, J.S., Clüver, K., Hua, X.S. (eds.) Social Media Retrieval, pp. 263–281. Springer, Cham (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4555-4_12

  15. Kim, S., Kim, J., Koo, D., Kim, Y., Yoon, H., Shin, J.: Efficient privacy-preserving matrix factorization via fully homomorphic encryption. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 617–628 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kowald, D., Muellner, P., Zangerle, E., Bauer, C., Schedl, M., Lex, E.: Support the underground: characteristics of beyond-mainstream music listeners. EPJ Data Sci. 10(1), 1–26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-021-00268-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Li, Q., et al.: A survey on federated learning systems: vision, hype and reality for data privacy and protection. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. (2021). https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9599369

  18. Lin, Y., et al.: Meta matrix factorization for federated rating predictions. In: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 981–990 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Liu, J., Hu, Y., Guo, X., Liang, T., Jin, W.: Differential privacy performance evaluation under the condition of non-uniform noise distribution. J. Inf. Secur. Appl. 71, 103366 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Liu, X., et al.: When differential privacy meets randomized perturbation: a hybrid approach for privacy-preserving recommender system. In: Candan, S., Chen, L., Pedersen, T.B., Chang, L., Hua, W. (eds.) DASFAA 2017. LNCS, vol. 10177, pp. 576–591. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55753-3_36

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Muellner, P., Kowald, D., Lex, E.: Robustness of meta matrix factorization against strict privacy constraints. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, M.-F., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds.) ECIR 2021. LNCS, vol. 12657, pp. 107–119. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. Müllner, P., Lex, E., Schedl, M., Kowald, D.: ReuseKNN: neighborhood reuse for differentially-private KNN-based recommendations (2022). https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2206.11561

  23. Ramakrishnan, N., Keller, B.J., Mirza, B.J., Grama, A.Y., Karypis, G.: When being weak is brave: privacy in recommender systems. IEEE Internet Comput. 5(6), 54–62 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Parliament Regulation: Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European parliament and of the council. Regulation (EU) 679, 2016 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Strucks, C., Slokom, M., Larson, M.: BlurM(or)e: revisiting gender obfuscation in the user-item matrix (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Wang, C., Zheng, Y., Jiang, J., Ren, K.: Toward privacy-preserving personalized recommendation services. Engineering 4(1), 21–28 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Wang, Q., Yin, H., Chen, T., Yu, J., Zhou, A., Zhang, X.: Fast-adapting and privacy-preserving federated recommender system. VLDB J. 31(5), 877–896 (2022)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Xin, Y., Jaakkola, T.: Controlling privacy in recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NIPS 2014, vol. 2, pp. 2618–2626. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Zemel, R., Wu, Y., Swersky, K., Pitassi, T., Dwork, C.: Learning fair representations. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 325–333. PMLR (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Zhang, M., et al.: Membership inference attacks against recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 864–879 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Zhu, T., Li, G., Ren, Y., Zhou, W., Xiong, P.: Differential privacy for neighborhood-based collaborative filtering. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, pp. 752–759 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my supervisors Dominik Kowald and Elisabeth Lex for their feedback on this work. This work is supported by the “DDAI” COMET Module within the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme, funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit), the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs (bmdw), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the province of Styria (SFG) and partners from industry and academia. The COMET Programme is managed by FFG.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Müllner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Müllner, P. (2023). User Privacy in Recommender Systems. In: Kamps, J., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13982. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28241-6_52

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28241-6_52

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28240-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28241-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics