Author, as appears in the article.: Pamies-Estrems D; Castella-Roca J; Garcia-Alfaro J

Department: Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques

URV's Author/s: Castellà Roca, Jordi

Keywords: Web search engines Social networks Single-database Query logs Private information-retrieval Privacy Data streams Anonymization

Abstract: © 2013 IEEE. Web search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, Qwant, and DuckDuckGo) may process a myriad of search queries per second. According to Internet Live Stats, Google handles more than two hundred million queries per hour, i.e., about two trillion queries per year. For monetization purposes, the queries can be stored and complemented with additional data, referred to as query logs. Together, they can correlate valuable information to build accurate user profiles. Before releasing the query logs to third parties (e.g., for profit purposes), the personal information contained in the query logs must be properly protected by the web search engines. Current regulations establish strict control, and require from provable anonymization processing (e.g., in terms of statistical disclosure) of any personally identifiable information. In this paper, we tackle this challenge. We propose a real-time anonymization solution to protect streams of unstructured data at the server side. Our approach is based on the use of a probabilistic $k$ -anonymity technique. It allows probabilistic processing of personally identifiable attributes contained in the query logs, with provable privacy properties. Our solution handles limitations of traditional $k$ -anonymity approaches with respect to unstructured data and real-time processing. We present the implementation of our solution and report experimental evaluation results. The evaluation is conducted in terms of privacy, utility, and scalability achievement. Results validate the feasibility of our proposal.

Thematic Areas: Telecommunications Materials science (miscellaneous) Materials science (all) General materials science General engineering General computer science Engineering, electrical & electronic Engineering (miscellaneous) Engineering (all) Engenharias iv Engenharias iii Electrical and electronic engineering Computer science, information systems Computer science (miscellaneous) Computer science (all) Ciência da computação

licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/

ISSN: 2169-3536

Author's mail: jordi.castella@urv.cat

Author identifier: 0000-0002-0037-9888

Record's date: 2023-02-19

Journal volume: 8

Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Link to the original source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9085377

Licence document URL: http://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/

Papper original source: Ieee Access. 8 87393-87413

APA: Pamies-Estrems D; Castella-Roca J; Garcia-Alfaro J (2020). A Real-Time Query Log Protection Method for Web Search Engines. Ieee Access, 8(), 87393-87413. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2992012

Article's DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2992012

Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Journal publication year: 2020

Publication Type: Journal Publications