Cooperative privacy game: a novel strategy for preserving privacy in data publishing

Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, Jul 2016

Achieving data privacy before publishing has been becoming an extreme concern of researchers, individuals and service providers. A novel methodology, Cooperative Privacy Game (CoPG), has been proposed to achieve data privacy in which Cooperative Game Theory is used to achieve the privacy and is named as Cooperative Privacy (CoP). The core idea of CoP is to play the best strategy for a player to preserve his privacy by himself which in turn contributes to preserving other players privacy. CoP considers each tuple as a player and tuples form coalitions as described in the procedure. The main objective of the CoP is to obtain individuals (player) privacy as a goal that is rationally interested in other individuals’ (players) privacy. CoP is formally defined in terms of Nash equilibria, i.e., all the players are in their best coalition, to achieve k-anonymity. The cooperative values of the each tuple are measured using the characteristic function of the CoPG to identify the coalitions. As the underlying game is convex; the algorithm is efficient and yields high quality coalition formation with respect to intensity and disperse. The efficiency of anonymization process is calculated using information loss metric. The variations of the information loss with the parameters \(\alpha\) (weight factor of nearness) and \(\beta\) (multiplicity) are analyzed and the obtained results are discussed.

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Cooperative privacy game: a novel strategy for preserving privacy in data publishing

Kumari and Chakravarthy Hum. Cent. Comput. Inf. Sci. Cooperative privacy game: a novel strategy for preserving privacy in data publishing Valli Kumari 1 Srinivasa Chakravarthy 0 0 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NS Raju Institute of Technology , Sontyam, Vishakapatnam 531 173 , India 1 Department Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Andhra University , Visakhapatnam 530 003 , India Achieving data privacy before publishing has been becoming an extreme concern of researchers, individuals and service providers. A novel methodology, Cooperative Privacy Game (CoPG), has been proposed to achieve data privacy in which Cooperative Game Theory is used to achieve the privacy and is named as Cooperative Privacy (CoP). The core idea of CoP is to play the best strategy for a player to preserve his privacy by himself which in turn contributes to preserving other players privacy. CoP considers each tuple as a player and tuples form coalitions as described in the procedure. The main objective of the CoP is to obtain individuals (player) privacy as a goal that is rationally interested in other individuals' (players) privacy. CoP is formally defined in terms of Nash equilibria, i.e., all the players are in their best coalition, to achieve k-anonymity. The cooperative values of the each tuple are measured using the characteristic function of the CoPG to identify the coalitions. As the underlying game is convex; the algorithm is efficient and yields high quality coalition formation with respect to intensity and disperse. The efficiency of anonymization process is calculated using information loss metric. The variations of the information loss with the parameters α (weight factor of nearness) and β (multiplicity) are analyzed and the obtained results are discussed. Privacy preserving data publishing; k - anonymity; Cooperative game theory; Shapley value - Background Privacy concerns are rapidly increasing and there is a growing need for better privacy mechanisms to protect the privacy of individuals for different domains like social networks, Micro-data releases etc. There are different types of anonymization criterion like k-anonymity [ 1 ], ł-diversity [ 2 ] etc., (see [ 3 ] for some more mechanisms) proposed for temporally data base releases, however, still there are some issues in these methodologies to achieve privacy [ 3 ]. Motivation towards cooperative privacy In the social network scenarios, the acceptance of an unknown friend request causes providing his personal information as well as his existing friend’s information. In other words, the friend who doesn’t aware about privacy and if he accepts the friend request, then it may paves a way towards privacy theft of his private information as well as his friend’s information. It is not just enough to preserve our personal privacy, the people circled around us should also take an action. Though many social network sites provide different levels of privacy control, in addition rational cooperation of the people is also necessary. Domingo-Ferrer initiates epitome of cooperation in privacy and termed it as Co-Privacy [ 4, 5 ]. However, CoV (cooperative value) is modeled, that estimates the cooperation between the tuples using Cooperative Game Theory and it is titled as cooperative privacy. The following are the prime motivations towards the cooperative privacy (CoP) [5]: • To keep the information society growing on over a period of time, preservation of privacy is necessary It is just like trying to solve the global issues (e.g. international terrorism, global warming etc.) to sustain the physical world. Now, information society gives importance to preservation of privacy as they understand its significance but are scared of using these services. The people are forced towards privacy preservation in information society, just like the importance given to Go-Green and No Plastic by the environmentalists in society. • As far as possible, privacy should be maintained by the rational cooperation of others, in absence of which the entire information system may be inconsistent It is similar to the traffic rules. If a person doesn’t follow the traffic rules, it causes a trouble to others and some times it may lead to deadlock. Even though the government has scaffold privacy of users as human rights, they still remain quite unrealistic. Just the setting of rules by the government is not enough to achieve privacy preservation, effort should be put by the technology people to enforce the users to maintain privacy world. At the same time there should be a rational cooperation among the users for societal usefulness. This paper proposes a game named Cooperative Privacy Game (CoPG), using Coalitional Game Theory [ 6 ] to find the CoP of a data set which is to be published. In CoPG, each tuple is considered as a player and assigned a real value called cooperative value (CoV), which is formally defined as characteristic function. The CoV of each pla (...truncated)


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Valli Kumari, Srinivasa Chakravarthy. Cooperative privacy game: a novel strategy for preserving privacy in data publishing, Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 2016, pp. 12, Volume 6, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s13673-016-0069-y