Related papers: Personal data disclosure and data breaches: the cu…
Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and…
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users' private information…
While users claim to be concerned about privacy, often they do little to protect their privacy in their online actions. One prominent explanation for this "privacy paradox" is that when an individual shares her data, it is not just her…
The total variation distance is proposed as a privacy measure in an information disclosure scenario when the goal is to reveal some information about available data in return of utility, while retaining the privacy of certain sensitive…
We study an information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios where the private data is either observable or hidden. In each scenario, we first consider bounded mutual information as privacy leakage criterion, then we…
Ensuring the usefulness of electronic data sources while providing necessary privacy guarantees is an important unsolved problem. This problem drives the need for an analytical framework that can quantify the safety of personally…
Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's propensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain gratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and utility…
Privacy-preserving data release mechanisms aim to simultaneously minimize information-leakage with respect to sensitive data and distortion with respect to useful data. Dependencies between sensitive and useful data results in a…
We consider a user releasing her data containing some personal information in return of a service. We model user's personal information as two correlated random variables, one of them, called the secret variable, is to be kept private,…
The design of privacy mechanisms for two scenarios is studied where the private data is hidden or observable. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$, which is correlated with private data $X$, and wants to disclose the…
An information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios is studied where the private data is either hidden or observable. In each scenario, privacy leakage constraints are considered using two different measures. In…
We investigate the tradeoff between privacy and utility in a situation where both privacy and utility are measured in terms of mutual information. For the binary case, we fully characterize this tradeoff in case of perfect privacy and also…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
Machine learning is increasingly used in the most diverse applications and domains, whether in healthcare, to predict pathologies, or in the financial sector to detect fraud. One of the linchpins for efficiency and accuracy in machine…
One of major considerations in an online business is customer privacy. Consumers are not interested in being monitored and identified by sellers. Some solutions are proposed to hide selection of the customer but in the payment phase, there…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
The inevitable leakage of privacy as a result of unrestrained disclosure of personal information has motivated extensive research on robust privacy-preserving mechanisms. However, existing research is mostly limited to solving the problem…
We analyze the value to e-commerce website operators of offering privacy options to users, e.g., of allowing users to opt out of ad targeting. In particular, we assume that site operators have some control over the cost that a privacy…
As personal data have been the new oil of the digital era, there is a growing trend perceiving personal data as a commodity. Although some people are willing to trade their personal data for money, they might still expect limited privacy…
The pervasiveness of Internet of Things results in vast volumes of personal data generated by smart devices of users (data producers) such as smart phones, wearables and other embedded sensors. It is a common requirement, especially for Big…