Privacy Preserving Web Query Log Publishing: A Survey on Anonymization Techniques

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent techniques for anonymizing web query logs to protect user privacy while maintaining data utility for research and marketing purposes.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview and discussion of the latest anonymization methods applied to web query logs.

Findings

Various anonymization techniques have been developed to balance privacy and data utility.

Recent studies focus on differential privacy and k-anonymity adaptations for query logs.

Challenges remain in achieving optimal privacy-utility trade-offs.

Abstract

Releasing Web query logs which contain valuable information for research or marketing, can breach the privacy of search engine users. Therefore rendering query logs to limit linking a query to an individual while preserving the data usefulness for analysis, is an important research problem. This survey provides an overview and discussion on the recent studies on this direction.