Related papers: Distortion Search, A Web Search Privacy Heuristic
We ask how to defend user ability to plausibly deny their interest in topics deemed sensitive in the face of search engine learning. We develop a practical and scalable tool called \PDE{} allowing a user to detect and assess threats to…
Privacy is a well-understood concept in the physical world, with us all desiring some escape from the public gaze. However, while individuals might recognise locking doors as protecting privacy, they have difficulty practising equivalent…
The unprecedented capture and application of face images raise increasing concerns on anonymization to fight against privacy disclosure. Most existing methods may suffer from the problem of excessive change of the identity-independent…
Sequential querying of differentially private mechanisms degrades the overall privacy level. In this paper, we answer the fundamental question of characterizing the level of overall privacy degradation as a function of the number of queries…
Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search as a new method of evolutionary divergent search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm…
QoS-based Web service recommendation has recently gained much attention for providing a promising way to help users find high-quality services. To facilitate such recommendations, existing studies suggest the use of collaborative filtering…
In a technical treatment, this article establishes the necessity of transparent privacy for drawing unbiased statistical inference for a wide range of scientific questions. Transparency is a distinct feature enjoyed by differential privacy:…
Differential privacy comes equipped with multiple analytical tools for the design of private data analyses. One important tool is the so-called "privacy amplification by subsampling" principle, which ensures that a differentially private…
When surfing the Internet, individuals leak personal and corporate information to third parties whose (legitimate or not) businesses revolve around the value of collected data. The implications are serious, from a person unwillingly…
This paper introduces a multi-round interaction problem with privacy constraints between two agents that observe correlated data. The agents alternately share data with one another for a total of K rounds such that each agent initiates…
This paper investigates the relation between three different notions of privacy: identifiability, differential privacy and mutual-information privacy. Under a unified privacy-distortion framework, where the distortion is defined to be the…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
A privacy-utility tradeoff is developed for an arbitrary set of finite-alphabet source distributions. Privacy is quantified using differential privacy (DP), and utility is quantified using expected Hamming distortion maximized over the set…
The assessment of bidirectional heuristic search has been incorrect since it was first published more than a quarter of a century ago. For quite a long time, this search strategy did not achieve the expected results, and there was a major…
Motivated by tensions between data privacy for individual citizens, and societal priorities such as counterterrorism and the containment of infectious disease, we introduce a computational model that distinguishes between parties for whom…
Over the last decade, proliferation of various online platforms and their increasing adoption by billions of users have heightened the privacy risk of a user enormously. In fact, security researchers have shown that sparse microdata…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
User-centered approaches have been extensively studied and used in the area of struggling search. Related research has targeted key aspects of users such as user satisfaction or frustration, and search success or failure, using a variety of…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
Smartphone based travel data collection has become an important tool for the analysis of transportation systems. Interest in sharing travel survey data has gained popularity in recent years as "Open Data Initiatives" by governments seek to…