Recent advances in computing have allowed for the possibility to collect large amounts of data on personal activities and private living spaces. Collecting and publishing a dataset in this environment can cause concerns over privacy of the individuals in the dataset. In this paper we examine these privacy concerns. In particular, given a target application, how can we mask sensitive attributes in the data while preserving the utility of the data in that target application. Our focus is on protecting attributes that are hidden and can be inferred from the data by machine learning algorithms. We propose a generic framework that (1) removes the knowledge useful for inferring sensitive information, but (2) preserves the knowledge relevant to a given target application. We use deep neural networks and generative adversarial networks (GAN) to create privacy-preserving perturbations. Our noise-generating network is compact and efficient for running on mobile devices. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method outperforms conventional methods in effectively hiding the sensitive attributes while guaranteeing high performance for the target application. Our results hold for new neural network architectures, not seen before during training and are suitable for training new classifiers.
Due to growing concerns about the privacy of personal information, organizations that use their customers' records in data mining activities are forced to take actions to protect the privacy of the individuals. A frequently used disclosure protection method is data perturbation. When used for data mining, it is desirable that perturbation preserves statistical relationships between attributes, while providing adequate protection for individual confidential data. To achieve this goal, we propose a kd-tree based perturbation method, which recursively partitions a data set into smaller subsets such that data records within each subset are more homogeneous after each partition. The confidential data in each final subset are then perturbed using the subset average. An experimental study is conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method Methods for privacy protection of microdata include grouping and publication of data perturbed with random noise. The authors suggest a variant of the latter in which the noise is generated by bootstrapping from the original empirical distribution. The published data distribution then essentially consists of a convolution of a distribution with itself and the distribution can be recovered, although the individual observations remain protected. The authors explore the trade-off between privacy protection based on bootstrapping and the efficiency of estimation using the published data. For reasonable loss measures, the trade-off is hyperbolic in character. Some encouraging simulation results are reported. This paper explores the possibility of using multiplicative random projection matrices for privacy preserving distributed data mining. It specifically considers the problem of computing statistical aggregates like the inner product matrix, correlation coefficient matrix, and Euclidean distance matrix from distributed privacy sensitive data possibly owned by multiple parties. This class of problems is directly related to many other data-mining problems such as clustering, principal component analysis, and classification. This paper makes primary contributions on two different grounds. First, it explores independent component analysis as a possible tool for breaching privacy in deterministic multiplicative perturbation-based models such as random orthogonal transformation and random rotation. Then, it proposes an approximate random projection-based technique to improve the level of privacy protection while still preserving certain statistical characteristics of the data. The paper presents extensive theoretical analysis and experimental results. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique is effective and can be successfully used for different types of privacy-preserving data mining applications. 