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The best privacy defense is a good privacy offense: obfuscating a search engine user’s profile

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Abstract

User privacy on the internet is an important and unsolved problem. So far, no sufficient and comprehensive solution has been proposed that helps a user to protect his or her privacy while using the internet. Data are collected and assembled by numerous service providers. Solutions so far focused on the side of the service providers to store encrypted or transformed data that can be still used for analysis. This has a major flaw, as it relies on the service providers to do this. The user has no chance of actively protecting his or her privacy. In this work, we suggest a new approach, empowering the user to take advantage of the same tool the other side has, namely data mining to produce data which obfuscates the user’s profile. We apply this approach to search engine queries and use feedback of the search engines in terms of personalized advertisements in an algorithm similar to reinforcement learning to generate new queries potentially confusing the search engine. We evaluated the approach using a real-world data set. While evaluation is hard, we achieve results that indicate that it is possible to influence the user’s profile that the search engine generates. This shows that it is feasible to defend a user’s privacy from a new and more practical perspective.

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Notes

  1. While AOL retracted the data, several pages still provide access to the data and keep analyzing it, e.g., see http://www.aolstalker.com/.

  2. This resembles the expected value for the distance between the user interest category \(\kappa _i\) and the assignment to an interest category by the search engine, with the difference that the categories do not exclude each other and thus the probabilities do not sum up to one.

  3. In the terminology of Ceci et al., we are thus using a so-called proper training set, not a hierarchical training set. Another notable difference from standard hierarchical text categorization is that our training set consists of queries, not of full documents.

  4. The implementation is available upon request.

  5. Detailed results and statistics on the results are given in the supplementary material.

  6. This could only be the case when the same action with regard to the user interest category would be chosen, which is not the case. This action almost never gets chosen, as it simply never is evaluated by high scores (details not shown here).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Nicolas Krauter for the help on the initial implementation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Staudingerweg 9, 55128, Mainz, Germany

    Jörg Wicker & Stefan Kramer

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  1. Jörg Wicker
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  2. Stefan Kramer
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Correspondence to Jörg Wicker.

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Responsible editors: Kurt Driessens, Dragi Kocev, Marko Robnik Šikonja, Myra Spiliopoulou

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Supplementary material 1 (pdf 3827 KB)

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Wicker, J., Kramer, S. The best privacy defense is a good privacy offense: obfuscating a search engine user’s profile. Data Min Knowl Disc 31, 1419–1443 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-017-0524-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-017-0524-z

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