Privacy Protection Technologies: Introductory Overview

Privacy Protection Technologies：
Introductory Overview
Hiroshi Nakagawa
Presented at STM2016
23 July 2016

Overview of Privacy Protection Technologies
Whose privacy?
Questioner
to DB
Data subject whose personal data is in DB
Transform
query
Secure computation
Private IR
Add
dummy
Semantic
preserving
query
transform
Decompose
query
Homomorphic
encryption：
Encrypt query
and DB by
questioner’s
secret key. Then
search w.o.
decryption
Method? What data is perturbed?
DB Whether
respond or
not
Query audit
response
Add noise
Differential
Privacy=Math.
models of added
noise
Deterministic
vs
Probabilistic
Transform
DB to many
having the
same QI
k-anonym.
l-diversity
t-close
anatomy
pseudonymize：
randomize Personal ID by
hash function

Updated Personal Information
Protection Act in Japan
– The EU General Data Protection Regulation is finally
agreed in 2016
• Japan: Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA):
Sep.2015
• Anonymized Personal Information is introduced.
– Anonymized enough not to de-anonymized easily
– Freely used without the consent of data subject.
– Currently, Pseudonymized data is not regarded as
Anonymized Personal Information
• Boarder line between pseudonymized and
anonymized is a critical issue.

What is pseudonymization?
Real ID(name etc.) Private Data 1 … Private Data N
Real ID Pseudonym Pseudonym Private Data 1 … Private Data N
This records only is disclosed
and used
Pseudonym is such as a hash
function value of Real ID

Variations of Pseudonymization
in terms of frequency of pseudonym update
pseu weight
A123 60.0
A123 65.5
A123 70.8
A123 68.5
A123 69.0
pseu weight
A123 60.0
A123 65.5
B432 70.8
B432 68.5
C789 69.0
pseu weight
A123 60.0
B234 65.5
C567 70.8
X321 68.5
Y654 69.0
weight
60.0
65.5
70.8
68.5
69.0
Same
Info.
• No
pseudonym
update
• Highly
identifiable
• Needed in
med., farm.
Update
pseud.
Frequent
update
• pseudonym
update
• Divide k subsets
with different
pseudonyms
• Freq. update
lowers both
identifiability and
data value
• Update
pseudonym
data by data
• Regarded as
distinct
person’s data.
No
identifiability
The same individual’s personal data
obscurity

• Pseudonymization without updating for
accumulated time sequence personal data
– Accumulation makes a data subject be easily
identified by this sequence of data
– Then reasonable to prohibit it to transfer the third
party
– PIPA sentence reads pseudonymized personal data
without updating is not Anonymized Personal
Information.
• Obscurity, in which every data of the same person has
distinct pseudonyms, certainly is Anonymized Personal
Information because there are no clue to aggregate the
same person’s data.
Is pseudonymization with updating not Anonymized
Personal Information (of new Japanese PIPA)?

Record Length
pseu Loc. １ Loc.２ Loc.3 …
A123 Minato Sibuya Asabu …
A144 Odaiba Toyosu Sinbasi …
A135 … … …. ….
A526 xy yz zw …
A427
• No pseudonym update
• High identifiability by
long location sequence
• Even if pseudonym is
deleted, long location
sequence makes it easy to
identify the specific data
subject.
transform
obscurity
Loc. １ Loc.２ Loc.3 …
Minato Sibuya Asabu …
Odaiba Toyosu Sinbas
i
…
… … …. ….
xy yz zw …

Technically, shuffling destroys link between same
person’s data
Minato yz zw …
Odaiba Toyosu Asabu …
… … …. ….
xy Sibuya Sinbasi …
shuffle
Minato Sibuya Asabu …
Odaiba Toyosu Sinbasi …
… … …. ….
xy yz zw …
Almost no clue to identify same individual’s record.
But data value is reduced.
obscurity

obscurity
 API
No update update for ever data
frequency of pseudonym update
Pseudonymize w.o.
update
 Not API
APINot API
Somewhere here is the
boundary.
The boundary between Anonymized Personal Info.(API) and no API

Continuously observed personal data
has high value in medicine
• Frequent updating of pseudonym enhances
anonymity,
• But reduces data value
– Especially in medicine.
– Physicians do not require “no update of pseudonym.”
– For instance, it seems to be enough to keep the same
pseudonym for one illness as I heard from a
researcher in medicine.

Updating frequency vs Data value
• see the figure below:
Data value
Update
frequency
No
update
low high
Update
data by data
location log
purchasing log
medical log

category Frequency of pseudonym
updating
Usage
Medical No update Able to analyze an individual patient’s
log ,especially history of chronic disease
and lifestyle
update Not able to pursue an individual patient’s
history. Able to recognize short term
epidemic
Driving record
No update If a data subject consents to use it with
Personal ID, the automobile manufacture
can get the current status of his/her own
car, and give some advice such as parts
being in need to repair.
If no consent, nothing can be done.

category Frequency of pseudonym
updating
Usage
Driving record
Low frequency Long range trend of traffic, which can be
used to urban design, or road traffic
regulation for day, i.e. Sunday.
High frequency We can only get a traffic in short period.
Purchasing
record
No update If a data subject consents to use it with
Personal ID, then it can be used for
targeted advertisement.
If no consent, we can only use to
extract sales statistics of ordinary goods.
Low frequency We can mine the long range trend of
individual’s purchasing behavior.
High frequency We can mine the short range trend of
individual’s purchasing behavior.
Every data We only investigate sales statistics of
specific goods

Summary: What usage is possible by
pseudonymization with/without updating
• As stated so far, almost all psedonymized data
are usefull in statistical processing
• No targeted advertisement, nor profiling of
individual person
• Pseudonymized data are hard to trace if it is
transferred to many organizations such as IT
companies.

Private Information Retrieval
(PIR)

what should be kept secret?
• Information which can identify a searcher of
DB or a user of services.
• Internet ID, name
• Location from where a searcher send the query
• Time of sending the query
• Query contents
• See next slide
• Existence of query

Why user privacy should be protected in IR?
• IT companies in US transfer or even sell user profile to the
government authorities such as:
– AOL responds more than 1000 a month,
– Facebook responds 10 to 20 request a day
– US Yahoo sells its members’ account, e-mail by 30$-40$ for
one account
• These make amount of profit for IT companies , but
no return to data subjects.
– Even worse, bad guy may steel them.
• Then, internet search engine users should employ technologies
that protect him/herself identity from search engine.

Keep secret the location a user sends a query
• A user wants to use a location based services
such as searching near by good restaurants,
but does not want the service provider his/her
location
• Using the trusted third party :TPP if exists
User ID, location
response
TPP alters the user ID and
location if necessary
response
The service
provider using a
user’s location
A user TPP

Mixing up several users’ locations
• In case of no TPP, several users trusting
each other make a group, and use the
location based services
ID=1
ID=２
ID=3
ID=４
[１，L(1)]
[L(1),2,L(2)] [L(1),L(2),3,L(3)]
Request for services
[L(1),L(2),L(3),4,L(4)]
Results
[Res(1),Res(2),Res(3),Res(4)]
[Res(1),Res(2)]
[Res(1)]
[Res(1),Res(2),
Res(3)]
The service
provider using a
user’s location
①
②
③
④
⑤
⑥⑦
⑧

• L(n) is a location of a user whose ID=n
• Starting from ID=1, and add up each user’s location and finally
k th user sends the mixed up locations and request the
services ① ④
• Each user only memorizes the previous user’s ID and when
receives the response , return it to the previous user as shown
in the figure below. ⑤⑧
– By shuffling locations in a location list, each user does not recognize
which response is for whose request.
– Similar to k-anonymization.
ID=1
ID=２
ID=3
ID=４
[１，L(1)]
[L(1),2,L(2)] [L(1),L(2),3,L(3)]
Request for services
[L(1),L(2),L(3),4,L(4)]
Results
[Res(1),Res(2),Res(3),Res(4)]
[Res(1),Res(2)]
[Res(1)]
[Res(1),Res(2),
Res(3)]
The service
provider using a
user’s location
①
②
③
④
⑤
⑥⑦
⑧

How to make it difficult to infer
the real query ?  Obfuscation
• A query is divided into words. Each word is used as
distinct query
• Add dummy term, say confusing words, to the query
• Replace a query word with semantically similar
word(s)
 When we get response( list of documents, etc.), we have to
select out the originally intended answer from them.

Outlook of PIR with obfuscation
Searcher’s profile：X＝ multinomial
distribution of 𝑝𝑖 which is the probability
of i th topic
Dummy
Generation
System：
DGS
Internet
Semantic
Classification
R,R,R
D,R,D,D,R
R:real query
D:dummy query
：generated by DGS
Q,Q,Q
D and R are
indistinguishable
from S.E.
Semantically
classification
Profile
refiner
X
Y
Dummy
filter
Z learned with profile
and dummy
Throw
awayQ if
regareded as
dummy
Revise
profile by
Q
regarded
as true
query
Search Engine: S.E.
（possibly adversary）Questioner：A
Y is the
inferred
value of
X

Supplemental explanation
 A questioner : A makes dummy queries D by DGS(dummy
generater system) based on the real query R, and send R
and D to the search engine: S.E., which might be an
adversary.
 S.E. receives Q which actually consists of R and D. Then S.E.
learns a questiner’s profile Z, and classifies Q into real
query and dummy queries.
 In this setting, the questioner wants Q not be classified into
R and D. In addition, he/she would not like his/her profile
inferred by S.E.. That is why adding D or replacing true R
with other words.

Private Information Retrieval
 Researchers in industry send queries to S.E. to search the
DB. Their queries indicate the information of R&D of their
company.
 They want to make the queries secret from S.E. of the DB.
 Ex. Query including both chemical compound A and B, which is
crucial for R&D.
Data Base
Try to preserve
the whole
contents of the
DB.
Query
Try to keep secret the query
Queries are the company’s
secret about their R&D.

Original
DB
Encrypted
DB
Encrypted
response
Encrypt DB with PKq.
Big DB requires big
amount of time to
encrypt.
Questioner has both
of public key:PKq
and secret key:SKq
Query encrypted
with PKq
Decrypt with SKq
Searching without
decryption.
Questioner’s Public key: PKq
Addition (and multiplication) can be done without
decryption for encrypted data if homomorphic
public key encryption is employed.

N
Finger print
Finger print expressions of
Chemical compound DB：much
smaller than the original
chemical compound formulaEncrypt this compound:X
with additive homomorphic
encryption:Enc(X)
Enc(X)and public key PKq
Encrypt DB with received
PKq, and calculate the
similarity based on Tversky
values between Enc(X) and
each encrypted compound.
Encrypted Tversky
values: Tv(X)
Decrypt Tv(X)
with SKq and
get to know the
similar
compound with X
Researcher in
chemical industry
０１１
０１１・・・
０１１・・・
００１・・・
１０１・・・
Chemical Compounds IR based on Secure Computation:
Developed by AIST Japan
X:

motivation
Can we anonymize personal data only by removing
invididual ID such as name and exact address?
No
Private information can be inferred by combining the
publicly open data: Link Attack
Un-connetable anonymity in Japanese medicine mainly for
research purpose: Pseudonymize and delete the linking data
between psedonym and personal ID.
 If the linking data is not deleted, we call “Connetable anonymity.”
Un-connetable anonymity is thought to be protecting patients’
personal medical data because this kind of data are only
confined in the medical organization.
If, however, the patients’ data are used in nursing care
organization or medicine related companies such as
pharmaceutical companies.

Classic Example of Link
• Sweeney [S01a] said the governor of Massachusetts
William Weld ‘s medical record was identified by
linking his medical data which deletes his name, and
the voter as shown in the figure.
• Combining both database
• 6 people have the same birth date of the
governor
• Within these 6 people, three are male.
• Within these three, only one has the
same ZIP code!
• According to the US 1990 census data,
– 87% of people are uniquely identified by zipcode, sex, and birth
 K-anonymization was proposed to remedy this situation.
Voter List
Ethnicity
Diagnosis
Medication
Total charge
ZIP Name
Birth date Adress
Sex Data
registered
Party
affiliation
Medical
Data

• Two methods to protect personal data stored in databases from link
attacks when this database is transferred or sold to the third party.
– Method１： Only Randomly sampled personal data is transferred
because whether specific person is stored in this sample DB or not is
unknown.
– Method2： Transform Quasi ID ( address, birthdate, sex ) less accurate
ones in order that at least k people has the same less accurate Quasi ID:
k-anonymization.
– In the right DB of the figure below, 3 people has the same (less accurate)
Quasi ID, say old lady, young girl, young boy 3-anonymity
3-anonymity DB
Transform Quasi ID
into less accurate
ones to make DB 3-
anonymity.

Example of transforming Quasi ID less
accurate
• Attribute of Quasi ID
– Personal ID（explicit identifiers） is deleted: anonymize
– Quasi ID can be used to identify individuals
– Attribute, especially sensitive attribute value should be
protected
Personal ID Quasi ID Sensitive info.
name Birth date gender Zipcode Disease name
John 21/1/79 M 53715 flu
Alice 10/1/81 F 55410 pneumonia
Beatrice 1/10/44 F 90210 bronchitis
Jack 21/2/84 M 02174 sprain
Joan 19/4/72 F 02237 AIDS
The objective : Keep each individual identified by Quasi ID
delete

Example of k-anonymity
Birth day gender Zipcode
21/1/79 M 53715
10/1/79 F 55410
1/10/44 F 90210
21/2/83 M 02274
19/4/82 M 02237
Birth day gender Zipcode
group 1
*/1/79 human 5****
*/1/79 human 5****
suppress 1/10/44 F 90210
group 2
*/*/8* M 022**
*/*/8* M 022**
Original DB 2-anonymized DB

Terminology: identify, specify
• Just the summary of basic terminology in Japanese
 specify：A data record becomes known to match to the real world
uniquely specified natural person by linking an anonymized
personal DB and other non anonymized personal DB
 Identify (or single out)：Data records of several DBs, are known to
be the unique same person’s data record by linking Quasi ID of
these DBs
 Without identified, specification is generally hard
 Neither identified nor specified case: Non-identify&non-specify
 Identified but not specified: Identify&non-specify
39

k-anonymization
• Sweeney and Samarati [S01, S02a, S02b]
• k-anonymization: transform quasi IDs to less accurate ones
so that at least k people have the same quasi IDs.
– By k-anonymization, the probability of being identified becomes
less than 1/k against link attack.
• Method
– Generalization of quasi ID values, or suppress a record having a
certain value of quasi ID.
• Not adding noise to attribute value
• Notice the tradeoff between privacy protection and data
value degradation ( especially for data mining)!
– Don’t transform more than necessary for k-anonymity!

Generalizations (1)
• Every node of the same level of classification tree are generalized as
shown in the figure below:
• Global generalization  accuracy downgraded a lot
– If a lawyer and an engineer are generalized as a specialist, then a musician and a painter
are generalized as an artisit, too.
• sepcialist artist
• lawyer engineer musician painter
• Only generalizing nodes in the subtree
– Even if a lawyer and an engineer are generalized as a specialist, a musician and
a painter are not generalized. Avoiding non-necessary generalization.
• sepcialist artist
•
41

Generalizations (2)
• Only one of children in a subtree is generalized
• specialist artist
• Local generalization :
– not all records but individual records are
generalized .
– Good point is less accuracy reduction.
• i.e. John(lawyer)  John(specialist) but Alex(lawyer) still
remains a lawyer. 42

Evaluation function in k-anonymization
• K-anonymization algorithm uses the following evaluation function
to control whether generalization continues or stop.
• minimal distortion metric:MD
– The number of lost precise data by generalization.
– For example, 10 engineers are generalized into specialist, MD=10
• 𝐼𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑣𝑔 =
𝑣 𝑔 −1
𝐷 𝐴
: The loss when more precise data than 𝑣𝑔 is
generalized to 𝑣𝑔
•
𝑣𝑔 is the number of kinds of data of 𝑣𝑔’s children.
𝐷𝐴 is the number of kinds of data of 𝑣𝑔
′ s attribute:A
43

Math science Bio science
Mathematics Statistics Chemistry Biology
𝐷𝐴 =4 𝑣𝑔 =2
𝐼𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠 𝑣𝑔 =
𝑣𝑔 − 1
𝐷𝐴
=
2 − 1
4
=
1
4
44

• Trade-off between information accuracy and
privacy
• 𝐼𝐺𝑃𝐿(𝑠) =
𝐼𝐺 𝑠
𝑃𝐿 𝑠 +1
– s means generalizing to data
– 𝐼𝐺 𝑠 is the loss of information gain or MD by
applying s
– 𝑃𝐿 𝑠 is the degree of anonymization by applying s
• If k-anonymization, the degree is k.
45

Lattice for generalization
k-anonymity
zipcode Birth date sex
Lattice for generalization of all quasi
IDs
Objective
Minimum generalization
Subject to k-anonymity
generality
less
more
Z0
Z1
Z2
={53715, 53710, 53706, 53703}
={5371*, 5370*}
={537**}
B0
B1
={26/3/1979, 11/3/1980, 16/5/1978}
={*}
<S0, Z0>
<S1, Z0> <S0, Z1>
<S1, Z1>
<S1, Z2>
<S0, Z2>
[0, 0]
[1, 0] [0, 1]
[1, 1]
[1, 2]
[0, 2]
S0
S1
={Male, Female}
={Person}

Use lattice for efficient generalization
incognito [LDR05]
Using monotonicity
<S0, Z0>
<S1, Z0> <S0, Z1>
<S1, Z1>
<S1, Z2>
<S0, Z2>
(I) Generalization property (~rollup)
if k-anonymity at a node
then nodes above the node satisfy k-anonymity
(II) Subset prpperty (~apriori)
if a set of quasi ID does not satisfy k-anonymity at a node
then a subset of the set of quasi ID does not satisfy k-
anonymity
e.g., <S1, Z0> satisfies k-anonymity
 <S1, Z1> and <S1, Z2> satisfy k-anonymity
e.g., <S0, Z0> k-匿名性でない
 <S0, Z0, B0> and <S0, Z0, B1> k-匿名性でない
To simplify, only about <S,Z>

Example Case:
Dividing does not anonymize
Example of Incognito
2 quasi ID , 7 data point
zipcode
sex
group 1
w. 2 tuples
group 2
w. 3 tuples
group 3
w. 2 tuples
not 2-anonymity
2-anonymity

Examples [LDR05, LDR06]
Each dimension is
sequentially
generalized
incognito [LDR05]
Each dimension is
independently
generalized
mondrian [LDR06]
All dimensions are
generalized at the same
time
topdown [XWP+06]
Strength of generalization

Mondrian
[LDR06]
2－anonymity

Grouping by boundary length[XWP+06]:
Bad
generalization
Long rectangle
Low datamining
accuracy
Good
generalization
Rectangle near
square
High datamining
accuracy

Topdown [XWP+06]
split algorithm
Start with the most distant two data points
• Heuristics
• aggregate to 2 groups from seeds to
The near point is to combined to the group so
that the boundary length of the combined
group is the minimum among cases other
point is combined.
The right figure shows the growing of red and
green group by adding ①, ② and ③.
①②
③
③
②
①

The problem of k-anonymity
• ４-anonymity example
• Homogeneity attack: The third group only consists of cancer patients. Then if combine
other DB, the four people in the third group are known to be cancer patients.
• Background knowledge attack: If it is known that in the first group is there one Japanese
who has rarely cardiac disease, the Japanese person’s illness is inferred as infectious
disease.
id Zipcode age nationality disease
1 13053 28 Russia Cardiac disease
2 13068 29 US Cardiac disease
3 13068 21 Japan Infectious dis.
4 13053 23 US Infectious dis.
5 14853 50 India Cancer
6 14853 55 Russia Cardiac disease
9 13053 31 US Cancer
10 13053 37 India Cancer
11 13068 36 Japan Cancer
12 13068 35 US Cancer
id Zipcode age nationality disease
1 130** <30 ∗ Cardiac disease
2 130** <30 ∗ Cardiac disease
3 130** <30 ∗ Infectious dis.
4 130** <30 ∗ Infectious dis.
5 1485* ≥40 ∗ Cancer
6 1485* ≥40 ∗ Cardiac disease
7 1485* ≥40 ∗ Infectious dis.
8 1485* ≥40 ∗ Infectious dis.
9 130** 3∗ ∗ Cancer
10 130** 3∗ ∗ Cancer
11 130** 3∗ ∗ Cancer
12 130** 3∗ ∗ Cancer
Anonymous DB 4-anonymity DB

l-diversity
[MGK+06]
• The purpose is that the sensitive information in each group is not skewed.
– Prevent homogeneity attack
– Prevent background knowledge attack
l-diversity (intuitive definition)
That a group is l-diverse is defined as at least
l kinds of values in the group.

55
name age sex disease
John 65 M flu
Jack 30 M gastritis
Alice 43 F pneumonia
Bill 50 M flu
Pat 70 F pneumonia
Peter 32 M flu
Joan 60 F flu
Ivan 55 M pneumonia
Chris 40 F rhinitis
john flu
Peter flu
Joan flu
Bill flu
Alice pneumonia
Pat pneumonia
Ivan pneumonia
Jack gastritis
Chris rhinitis
Divide into
disease
based sub
Databases
l-diversity algorithm part１
•DB is divided according to each value of sensitive information( disease
name).

56
John flu
Peter flu
Joan flu
Bill flu
Alice pneumonia
Pat pneumonia
Ivan pneumonia
Jack gastritis
Chris rhinitis
John flu
Joan flu
Alice pneumonia
Ivan pneumonia
Chris rhinitis
Peter flu
Bill flu
Pat pneumonia
Jack gastritis
Each of these two groups contains at
least 3 diseases: 3-diversity
l-diversity algorithm part２
•Select records from each of left hand side date group and sequentially add each of
the right hand side data group. Right hand side record can include Quasi ID of k-
anonymity.

Anatomy [Xiaokui06]
• Divide the original table( appeared in l-divesity algorithm part 1) into two
tables. The left and right table are only linked by group ID, here 1 and 2.
• 3-diversity
57
Group ID disease frequency
１ flu ２
１ pneumonia ２
１ rhinitis １
２ flu ２
２ pneumonia １
２ gastritis １
name age sex Group
ID
John 65 M １
Jack 30 M １
Alice 43 F １
Bill 50 M １
Pat 70 F １
Peter 32 M ２
Joan 60 F ２
Ivan 55 M ２
Chris 40 F ２ Data mining is done on these two tables.
Since each value is not generalized, the
expected accuracy is high.

Side effects of k-anonymity
Defamation

name age sex address Location at 2016/6/6 12:00
John 35 M Bunkyo hongo 11 K consumer finance shop
Dan 30 M Bunkyo Yusima 22 T University
Jack 33 M Bunkyo Yayoi 33 T University
Bill 39 M Bunkyo Nezu 44 Y hospital
John 30’s M Bunkyo K consumer finance shop
Dan 30’s M Bunkyo T University
Jack 30’s M Bunkyo T University
Bill 30’s M Bunkyo Y hospital
４-anonymize
Dan , Jack and Bill are not recognized a person different
from John by 4-anonyumity, all four persons are suspected
to stay at K consumer finance shopk-anonymization
provokes defamation on Dan, Jack and Bill.

k-anonymity provokes defamation
in sub area aggregation
k-anonymmized area : at
least k people are in this area
consumer
finance
shop
This university student who is
trying to find a job, is
suspected to stay at consumer
finance shop, and this situation
is not good for his job seeking
process.
Defama
tion

John 35 M Bunkyo hongo 11 K consumer finance shop
Dan 30 M Bunkyo Yusima 22 K consumer finance shop
Jack 33 M Bunkyo Yayoi 33 K consumer finance shop
Bill 39 M Bunkyo Nezu 44 K consumer finance shop
Exchange one person to
make DB 2-diversity
By 2-diversifying, Ales becomes strongly suspected to be at K
consumer finance shop  l-diversity provokes defamation
l-diversity makes situation worse
These values shows all four is
at K consumer finance shop
John 30’s M Bunkyo K consumer finance shop
Dan 30’s M Bunkyo K consumer finance shop
Jack 30’s M Bunkyo K consumer finance shop
Alex 30’s M Bunkyo Ｔ Univeristy

Why defamation happens?
• Case study
– A job candidate who is a good university student.
– He is in k people group that includes at least one
person who went to a consumer finance shop.
– A company he tries to take entrance examination
does not want hire a person who goes to a
consumer finance shop.
– He is suspected to go to a consumer finance
shop. defamation!

Back ground situation of defamation
• Case study cont.
– If the company deletes him from candidates, it must
use another time and money, say X, to check another
candidate:
– If the company hires a bad buy, it will suffer a certain
amount of damage, say Y, by his bad behavior.
– Then if the expected value of Y is more than X, the
company becomes very negative, otherwise not
negative about him.
– This is a defamation model from an economical point of
view.

Back ground situation of defamation
• Case study cont.
– Another factor is the probability that he actually
went to a consumer finance shop.
– This probability is proportional to the number of
consumer finance shop visitors, say s, in k people of
k-anonymity group = s/k.
– Y is proportional to s/k
– Then the relation is sketched in the figure on next
slide.

1
0 1
The subjective
probability of the
company suspects him
Y:The
expected
damage if the
company hires
him
X:The money
the company
has to spend
for checking
another
candidate
s/k

1
0 1
The subjective
probability of the
company suspects him
The expected
damage if the
company hires
him
The money
the company
has to spend
for checking
another
candidate
s/k
In this area, the company does
not pay if it suspects him
In this area, the company
should suspect him to avoid
the expected damage
C
The border
line between
defamation or
not

Solution
• Then the solution is simple:
– Make the border line as small as possible.
– But how?
• We can revise k-anonymization algorithm in order to
minimize the number of bad behavior guys in k-
anonymity group.
– This revision, however, reduce the accuracy of the data.
– Then the problem comes to be a optimization problem:
Maximize Accuracy of data
subject to number of bad guys ≤ 1
in k-anonymity group

A consumer finance shop is devided into 4 parts to
reduce # of poepole visit it is less or equal than one
K-anonymity area isdevided
into 4 areas
A concumer
finance
shop

Outline of proposed algorithm
1. Do k-anonymization.
2. If one group includes more than one bad guys
① Then combine this and two nearest groups
② Do k-anonymization to this combined group to make
two groups that includes at most one bad guys.
③ If step ② fails,
④ then go back to one step in 1. Do k-anonymization,
namely try to find another generalization in k-
anonymization.

Overview of Privacy Protection Technologies
Whose privacy?
Questioner
to DB
Data subject whose personal data is in DB
Transform
query
Secure computation
Private IR
Add
dummy
Semantic
preserving
query
transform
Decompose
query
Homomorphic
encryption：
Encrypt query
and DB by
questioner’s
secret key. Then
search w.o.
decryption
Method? What data is perturbed?
DB Whether
respond or
not
Query audit
response
Add noise
Differential
Privacy=Math.
models of
added noise
Deterministic
vs
Probabilistic
Transform
DB to many
having the
same QI
k-anonym.
l-diversity
t-close
anatomy
pseudonymize：
randomize Personal ID by
hash function

Motivation of DP
• A query is the highest price (red number) paid by customers.
• The highest till March 10th is 60,000 yen. It becomes 1,000,000 yen on March
11th.
• If some one sees in the store and gets the answer of 10 th and 11th,
he/she gets the information about that is he bought a jewel of
1,000,000 yen , and probably is very rich.
• This privacy breach is avoided if we add some noise to the answer:  DP
DB：D(sales data of jewel
store by March 10th
５0
７0
１0
４0 ２0
３0６0
DB：D(sales data of jewel
store by March 11th
５0
７0
１0
４0 ２0
３0６0
He is known
to come to
the store on
March 11
１００0

Simple Example
DB：D DB：D’
D differs from D’only by one record of .
We want to prevent a questioner from realizing which DB, say D or D’ is used to
make an answer. For this purpose, DP adds a noise to the answer.
 example： A question is the number of men and women in DB.
 If no noise is added, the answer from D is 4 men and 3 women,
 the answer from D’is 5 men and 3 women.
 Then D’is known to have one more man than D.
  There is a chance to realize that is in D’.

Simple Example cont.
DB：D DB：D’
 Then D’is known to have one more man than D.
  There is a chance to realize that is in D’.
 DP adds a noise as follows: Add 1 to the answer of men number of D.
 Add -1 to the answer of men number of D’.
 Then , the answer from D is （５ men ，３ women）、 that from D’is （４ men ，３
women）  The questioner does not know whether is in DB or not.
 It is a strong privacy protection if the existence it self is concealed .

How large a noise
should be?
 In the above figure, X00 means that a year income is X,000,000 yen.
 The highest income in D is 8,000,000yen, and that of D’is 15,000,000 yen.
 A question of the highest year income reveals that D’includes a high income
person.
 In order to prevent this breach, we should add something like 7,000,000 yen =
15,000,000-8,000,000 yen. It is so big that the accuracy or usefulness of DB is
impaired very
 More accurately, a size of noise should be heavily related to the largest difference
of answer from D and that of D’.
 This largest difference is called sensitivity in DP.
DB：D DB：D’
１５００
５００
７００
６００
８００２００
３００６００５００
７００
６００
８００２００
３００６００

DP is
For the most similar pair of DBs, say, only one
record is different, D and D’
A query is asking a function such as a sum of the
specified attribute,
Then DP is a mechanism of adding a certain noise
to the answer, say f, in order not to be recognized
which of DBs are used . f(D) (or f(D’)) is a noise
added answer
 𝜀, 𝛿 − 𝐷𝑃 is the following
∀𝐷, 𝐷′
𝑃 𝑓 𝐷 ≤ 𝑒 𝜀
𝑃 𝑓 𝐷′
+ 𝛿

Randomly sampled DB
• The purpose of DP is not to be recognized the existence of
• In a sampled DB, to decide whether is in the DB is difficult
• When sampling rate is 𝛽, then the noise 𝜀1, 𝛿1 to add is smaller than
the full DB case 𝜀 , 𝛿 .
• 𝛿1 = 𝛽𝛿, 𝑒 𝜀1 − 1 = 𝛽 𝑒 𝜀
− 1
Sampled DB
𝜀1, 𝛿1
Random
sampling of β
？
Full DB 𝜀, 𝛿

Reference
• [LDR 05]LeFevre, K., DeWitt, D.J., Ramakrishnan, R. Incognito: Efficient Full-domain k-Anonymity. SIGMOD, 2005.
• [LDR06]LeFevre, K., DeWitt, D.J., Ramakrishnan, R. Mondrian Multidimensional k-Anonymity. ICDE, 2006.
• [XWP+06] Xu, J., Wang, W., Pei, J., Wang, X., Shi, B., Fu, A., Utility-Based Anonymization Using Local Recoding. SIGKDD,
2006.
• [MGK2007]MACHANAVAJJHALA,A. KIFER,D. GEHRKE,J. and VENKITASUBRAMANIAM, U. l-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-
Anonymity. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, Vol. 1, No. 1, Article 3,2007
• [S01] Samarati, P. Protecting Respondents' Identities in Microdata Release. IEEE TKDE, 13(6):1010-1027, 2001.
• [S02a] Sweeney, L. k-Anonymity: A Model for Protecting Privacy. International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and
Knowledge-based Systems, 2002.
• [S02b] Sweeney, L. k-Anonymity: Achieving k-Anonymity Privacy Protection using Generalization and Suppresion.
International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems, 2002.
• Ninghui Li,Tiancheng Li,Venkatasubramanian, S. “t-Closeness: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity and –Diversity”. ICDE2007,
pp.106-115, 2007.
• [SMP] Sacharidis, D., Mouratidis, K., Papadias, D. k-Anonymity in the Presence of External Databases（to be appeared)
• [Xiaokui06] X. Xiaokui and T. Yufei. (2006). Anatomy: Simple and Effective Privacy Preservation. VLDB, 139-150.
• [Dwork & Roth] Dwork C. and A.Roth. (2013). The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy. Foundations and
Trends in Theoretical Computer Science Vol.9 Nos. 3-4, 211-407 DOI: 10.1561/0400000042.
• [Li,Qardaji,Su2012] Ninghui Li, Wahbeh Qardaji, Dong Su: On Sampling, Anonymization, and Differential Privacy: Or,
k-Anonymization Meets Differential Privacy. Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and
Communications Security(ASIACCS’12). Pages 32-33. 2012

Privacy Protection Technologies: Introductory Overview

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Privacy Protection Technologies: Introductory Overview