Privacy-enhancing personalized web search

Abstract

Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals. However, users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines. On the other hand, privacy is not absolute, and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user. Thus, a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection. This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles. These profiles summarize a user's interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests. Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine. Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings. More importantly, results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information, which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information.

Shall I post this now? Optimized, delay-based privacy protection in social networks

“…Conceptually, a user profile may be interpreted as a histogram of relative frequencies of messages across a day, week, month or year. The proposed user-profile model is a natural, intuitive representation in line with the models used in many information systems to characterize user profiles [27], [37], [38], [39], [40]. In our adversary model, we distinguish between two kinds of profiles.…”

A Survey on Privacy Assurance in Personalized Web Search

“…Xu et al in [7] proposed a privacy protection solution for PWS based on hierarchical profiles. Using a user specified threshold a generalized profile achieves in effect as a rooted subtree of the complete profile.…”

Sharing private data through personalized search

“…Private web searching (Saint-Jean et al 2007;Xu et al 2007) is the process of retrieving information from the Internet without revealing private information about the retriever. Private web searching anonymizes or hides a retriever's profile and/or identity, such as user name, gender, or IP address of the PC that the retriever uses for web searching.…”