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In the big data era, more and more cloud-based data-driven applications are developed that leverage individual data to provide certain valuable services (the utilities). On the other hand, since the same set of individual data could be…
Physical distancing, as a measure to contain the spreading of Covid-19, is defining a "new normal". Unless belonging to a family, pedestrians in shared spaces are asked to observe a minimal (country-dependent) pairwise distance. Coherently,…
Privacy is an increasingly important aspect of data publishing. Reasoning about privacy, however, is fraught with pitfalls. One of the most significant is the auxiliary information (also called external knowledge, background knowledge, or…
Concern about how to aggregate sensitive user data without compromising individual privacy is a major barrier to greater availability of data. The model of differential privacy has emerged as an accepted model to release sensitive…
In distributed learning settings, models are iteratively updated with shared gradients computed from potentially sensitive user data. While previous work has studied various privacy risks of sharing gradients, our paper aims to provide a…
Personal mobility data from mobile phones and other sensors are increasingly used to inform policymaking during pandemics, natural disasters, and other humanitarian crises. However, even aggregated mobility traces can reveal private…
We propose a practical methodology to protect a user's private data, when he wishes to publicly release data that is correlated with his private data, in the hope of getting some utility. Our approach relies on a general statistical…
In pervasive computing environments, Location- Based Services (LBSs) are becoming increasingly important due to continuous advances in mobile networks and positioning technologies. Nevertheless, the wide deployment of LBSs can jeopardize…
We analyze how the sparsity of a typical aggregate social relation impacts the network overhead of online communication systems designed to provide k-anonymity. Once users are grouped in anonymity sets there will likely be few related pairs…
Location-based services (LBSs) have become widely popular. Despite their utility, these services raise concerns for privacy since they require sharing location information with untrusted third parties. In this work, we study privacy-utility…
Valuable insights, such as frequently visited environments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, can oftentimes only be gained by analyzing sensitive data spread across edge-devices like smartphones. To facilitate such an analysis, we…
Secure aggregation (SecAgg) is a commonly-used privacy-enhancing mechanism in federated learning, affording the server access only to the aggregate of model updates while safeguarding the confidentiality of individual updates. Despite…
Location data is frequently collected from populations and shared in aggregate form to guide policy and decision making. However, the prevalence of aggregated data also raises the privacy concern of membership inference attacks (MIAs). MIAs…
Many times the nodes of a complex network, whether deliberately or not, are aggregated for technical, ethical, legal limitations or privacy reasons. A common example is the geographic position: one may uncover communities in a network of…
Providing meaningful privacy to users of location based services is particularly challenging when multiple locations are revealed in a short period of time. This is primarily due to the tremendous degree of dependence that can be…
Social structures influence a variety of human behaviors including mobility patterns, but the extent to which one individual's movements can predict another's remains an open question. Further, latent information about an individual's…
Concerns about data privacy are omnipresent, given the increasing usage of digital applications and their underlying business model that includes selling user data. Location data is particularly sensitive since they allow us to infer…
Location privacy has been extensively studied in the literature. However, existing location privacy models are either not rigorous or not customizable, which limits the trade-off between privacy and utility in many real-world applications.…
Accurately predicting whether an image is private before sharing it online is difficult due to the vast variety of content and the subjective nature of privacy itself. In this paper, we evaluate privacy models that use objects extracted…
Mobile crowdsensing has emerged as an efficient sensing paradigm which combines the crowd intelligence and the sensing power of mobile devices, e.g.,~mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets. This article addresses the…