Related papers: Privacy against Statistical Matching: Inter-User C…
Location data collection has become widespread with smart phones becoming ubiquitous. Smart phone apps often collect precise location data from users by offering \textit{free} services and then monetize it for advertising and marketing…
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can infer private user attributes (e.g., age, location, gender) from user-generated text shared online, enabling rapid and large-scale privacy breaches. Existing…
Data ecosystems are becoming larger and more complex due to online tracking, wearable computing, and the Internet of Things. But privacy concerns are threatening to erode the potential benefits of these systems. Recently, users have…
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…
The rapid rise of IoT and Big Data has facilitated copious data driven applications to enhance our quality of life. However, the omnipresent and all-encompassing nature of the data collection can generate privacy concerns. Hence, there is a…
Data is the new oil; this refrain is repeated extensively in the age of internet tracking, machine learning, and data analytics. As data collection becomes more personal and pervasive, however, public pressure is mounting for privacy…
In location-based services(LBSs), it is promising for users to crowdsource and share their Point-of-Interest(PoI) information with each other in a common cache to reduce query frequency and preserve location privacy. Yet most studies on…
As the reliance on GPS technology for navigation grows, so does the ethical dilemma of balancing its indispensable utility with the escalating concerns over user privacy. This study investigates the trade-offs between GPS utility and…
Motivated by various data science applications including de-anonymizing user identities in social networks, we consider the graph alignment problem, where the goal is to identify the vertex/user correspondence between two correlated graphs.…
The wide adoption of wearable smart devices with onboard cameras greatly increases people's concern on privacy infringement. Here we explore the possibility of easing persons from photos captured by smart devices according to their privacy…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
Anonymous communication networks have emerged as crucial tools for obfuscating communication pathways and concealing user identities. However, their practical deployments face significant challenges, including susceptibility to artificial…
The physical environment you navigate strongly determines which communities and people matter most to individuals. These effects drive both personal access to opportunities and the social capital of communities, and can often be observed in…
Contact tracing is being widely employed to combat the spread of COVID-19. Many apps have been developed that allow for tracing to be done automatically based off location and interaction data generated by users. There are concerns,…
This paper aims to stir debate about a disconcerting privacy issue on web browsing that could easily emerge because of unethical practices and uncontrolled use of technology. We demonstrate how straightforward is to capture behavioral data…
Implicit authentication consists of a server authenticating a user based on the user's usage profile, instead of/in addition to relying on something the user explicitly knows (passwords, private keys, etc.). While implicit authentication…
Human mobility data is a crucial resource for urban mobility management, but it does not come without personal reference. The implementation of security measures such as anonymization is thus needed to protect individuals' privacy. Often, a…
In this paper, we design user-centric obfuscation mechanisms that impose the minimum utility loss for guaranteeing user's privacy. We optimize utility subject to a joint guarantee of differential privacy (indistinguishability) and…
Recent work~\cite{Liu2016} has shown that dependencies between items in a dataset can lead to privacy leaks. We extend this concept to privacy-preserving transformations, considering a broader set of dependencies captured by correlation…
The extensive use of smartphones and wearable devices has facilitated many useful applications. For example, with Global Positioning System (GPS)-equipped smart and wearable devices, many applications can gather, process, and share rich…