Release Connection Fingerprints in Social Networks Using Personalized Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces methods for releasing connection fingerprints in social networks while respecting individual privacy preferences using personalized differential privacy, improving accuracy over existing approaches.

Contribution

It proposes two novel schemes, DEBA and DUBA-LF, for privacy-preserving publication of connection fingerprints based on personalized differential privacy, with theoretical guarantees and superior performance.

Findings

Schemes achieve lower publication errors on real datasets

Theoretical analysis confirms privacy guarantees

Methods effectively handle user-specific privacy preferences

Abstract

In social networks, different users may have different privacy preferences and there are many users with public identities. Most work on differentially private social network data publication neglects this fact. We aim to release the number of public users that a private user connects to within n hops, called n-range Connection fingerprints(CFPs), under user-level personalized privacy preferences. We proposed two schemes, Distance-based exponential budget absorption (DEBA) and Distance-based uniformly budget absorption using Ladder function (DUBA-LF), for privacy-preserving publication of the CFPs based on Personalized differential privacy(PDP), and we conducted a theoretical analysis of the privacy guarantees provided within the proposed schemes. The implementation showed that the proposed schemes are superior in publication errors on real datasets.