Privacy-Aware Data Cleaning-as-a-Service (Extended Version)

Abstract

Data cleaning is a pervasive problem for organizations as they try to reap value from their data. Recent advances in networking and cloud computing technology have fueled a new computing paradigm called Database-as-a-Service, where data management tasks are outsourced to large service providers. In this paper, we consider a Data Cleaning-as-a-Service model that allows a client to interact with a data cleaning provider who hosts curated, and sensitive data. We present PACAS: a Privacy-Aware data Cleaning-As-a-Service model that facilitates interaction between the parties with client query requests for data, and a service provider using a data pricing scheme that computes prices according to data sensitivity. We propose new extensions to the model to define generalized data repairs that obfuscate sensitive data to allow data sharing between the client and service provider. We present a new semantic distance measure to quantify the utility of such repairs, and we re-define the notion of consistency in the presence of generalized values. The PACAS model uses (X,Y,L)-anonymity that extends existing data publishing techniques to consider the semantics in the data while protecting sensitive values. Our evaluation over real data show that PACAS safeguards semantically related sensitive values, and provides lower repair errors compared to existing privacy-aware cleaning techniques.