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Privacy-Preserving Crowd-Sourcing of Web Searches with Private Data Donor

Primault, V; Lampos, V; Cox, I; De Cristofaro, E; (2019) Privacy-Preserving Crowd-Sourcing of Web Searches with Private Data Donor. In: Liu, Ling and White, Ryen, (eds.) Proceeding of the International World Wide Web Conference. (pp. pp. 1487-1497). ACM: NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

Search engines play an important role on the Web, helping users find relevant resources and answers to their questions. At the same time, search logs can also be of great utility to researchers. For instance, a number of recent research efforts have relied on them to build prediction and inference models, for applications ranging from economics and marketing to public health surveillance. However, companies rarely release search logs, also due to the related privacy issues that ensue, as they are inherently hard to anonymize. As a result, it is very difficult for researchers to have access to search data, and even if they do, they are fully dependent on the company providing them. Aiming to overcome these issues, this paper presents Private Data Donor (PDD), a decentralized and private-by-design platform providing crowd-sourced Web searches to researchers. We build on a cryptographic protocol for privacy preserving data aggregation, and address a few practical challenges to add reliability into the system with regards to users disconnecting or stopping using the platform. We discuss how PDD can be used to build a flu monitoring model, and evaluate the impact of the privacy-preserving layer on the quality of the results. Finally, we present the implementation of our platform, as a browser extension and a server, and report on a pilot deployment with real users.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Privacy-Preserving Crowd-Sourcing of Web Searches with Private Data Donor
Event: IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference)
Location: San Francisco (CA), USA
Dates: 13th-17th May 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-4503-6674-8
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/3308558.3313474
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313474
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2019 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10068200
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