TY - GEN
T1 - Differential Privacy-Preserving User Linkage across Online Social Networks
AU - Yao, Xin
AU - Zhang, Rui
AU - Zhang, Yanchao
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China through grants 61902433, Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China through grants 2019JJ50802 and 2019JJ50288, US National Science Foundation through grants CNS-1933069, CNS-1824355, CNS-1651954 (CAREER), CNS-1718078 and CNS-1933047.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021/6/25
Y1 - 2021/6/25
N2 - Many people maintain accounts at multiple online social networks (OSNs). Multi-OSN user linkage seeks to link the same person's web profiles and integrate his/her data across different OSNs. It has been widely recognized as the key enabler for many important network applications. User linkage is unfortunately accompanied by growing privacy concerns about real identity leakage and the disclosure of sensitive user attributes. This paper initiates the study on privacy-preserving user linkage across multiple OSNs. We consider a social data collector (SDC) which collects perturbed user data from multiple OSNs and then performs user linkage for commercial data applications. To ensure strong user privacy, we introduce two novel differential privacy notions, ϵ-attribute indistinguishability and ϵ-profile indistinguishability, which ensure that any two users' similar attributes and profiles cannot be distinguished after perturbation. We then present a novel Multivariate Laplace Mechanism (MLM) to achieve ϵ-attribute indistinguishability and ϵ-profile indistinguishability. We finally propose a novel differential privacy-preserving user linkage framework in which the SDC trains a classifier for user linkage across different OSNs. Extensive experimental studies based on three real datasets confirm the efficacy of our proposed framework.
AB - Many people maintain accounts at multiple online social networks (OSNs). Multi-OSN user linkage seeks to link the same person's web profiles and integrate his/her data across different OSNs. It has been widely recognized as the key enabler for many important network applications. User linkage is unfortunately accompanied by growing privacy concerns about real identity leakage and the disclosure of sensitive user attributes. This paper initiates the study on privacy-preserving user linkage across multiple OSNs. We consider a social data collector (SDC) which collects perturbed user data from multiple OSNs and then performs user linkage for commercial data applications. To ensure strong user privacy, we introduce two novel differential privacy notions, ϵ-attribute indistinguishability and ϵ-profile indistinguishability, which ensure that any two users' similar attributes and profiles cannot be distinguished after perturbation. We then present a novel Multivariate Laplace Mechanism (MLM) to achieve ϵ-attribute indistinguishability and ϵ-profile indistinguishability. We finally propose a novel differential privacy-preserving user linkage framework in which the SDC trains a classifier for user linkage across different OSNs. Extensive experimental studies based on three real datasets confirm the efficacy of our proposed framework.
KW - User linkage
KW - differential privacy
KW - online social networks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85115351645&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85115351645&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IWQOS52092.2021.9521333
DO - 10.1109/IWQOS52092.2021.9521333
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85115351645
T3 - 2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQOS 2021
BT - 2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQOS 2021
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 29th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service, IWQOS 2021
Y2 - 25 June 2021 through 28 June 2021
ER -