Abstract:

In this paper we study privacy preservation for the publication of search engine query logs. We introduce a new privacy concern, "website privacy" as a special case of "business privacy". We define the possible adversaries who could be interested in disclosing website information and the vulnerabilities in the query log, which they could exploit. We elaborate on anonymization techniques to protect website information, discuss different types of attacks that an adversary could use and propose an anonymization strategy for one of these attacks. We then present a graph-based heuristic to validate the effectiveness of our anonymization method and perform an experimental evaluation of this approach. Our experimental results show that the query log can be appropriately anonymized against the specific attack, while retaining a significant volume of useful data.